0^^:-: 


..v.;  ^3 


THE 

lEATER  ENGLISH  POETS 

OF  THE 

NINETEENTH   CENTURY 


BY 
WILLIAM  MORTON   PAYNE,  LL.D. 


NEW  YORK 
HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 
1907 


Copyright,  1907, 

BY 
HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 


Published  October^  igoj 


THE   QUINK    ft   BODEN    CO.    PRESS 
RAHWAY,    N.    J. 


TO  THE  MEMORY 

OF 

Cbarlee  IkenOaU  BOams 

LATE  PRESIDENT 

OF    THE 

UNIVERSITY  OF  WISCONSIN 


i  / 


preface 

This  volume  is  based  upon  a  course  of  lectures 
given  at  the  Universities  of  Wisconsin,  Kansas,  and 
Chicago.  While  some  slight  changes  have  been  made 
in  revising  the  text  for  publication,  the  matter  is 
here  reproduced  substantially  as  it  was  delivered, 
the  twelve  lectures  becoming  the  twelve  chapters  of 
the  book.  This  explanation  of  the  origin  of  the 
work  will  account  for  its  salient  features,  such  as 
the  avoidance  of  minutise,  the  direct  manner  of  the 
discourse,  and  the  liberal  use  of  quotations,  both  by 
way  of  illustration  and  of  commentary.  The  author 
has  not  hesitated  to  give  copious  extracts  from  the 
poets  considered,  and  he  has  also  made  free,  with  due 
acknowledgment,  of  the  opinions  of  other  critics 
whenever  they  have  seemed  to  him  possessed  of  per- 
tinence and  finality. 

As  the  text  explains  and  frequently  emphasises,  the 
purpose  of  this  work  is  not  so  much  to  discuss  the 
twelve  men  considered  in  their  character  as  poetic 
artists,  as  to  view  them  in  their  relations  to  the 
world  of  thought  and  action.  Although  the  char- 
acter of  their  work  as  an  aesthetic  product  is  by  no 
means  ignored,  it  is  given  a  place  of  secondary  im- 
portance in  the  exposition,  the  author's  main  object 
being  to  examine  their  poetry   with  respect  to  its 

V 


vi  PREFACE 

intellectual  content,  to  set  forth  their  ideas  upon 
reHgious  and  philosophical  subjects,  and  to  discuss 
their  attitude  toward  the  poHtical  and  social  condi- 
tions of  their  time.  This,  at  all  events,  is  not  as  dis- 
tinctly a  work  of  supererogation  as  would  be  a  repe- 
tition of  that  combination  of  Hterary  analysis  and 
personal  characterisation  which  is  most  frequently 
given  us  in  a  survey  of  any  group  of  poets. 

No  one  could  be  more  painfully  aware  than  the 
present  wi'iter  of  the  inadequacy  of  one  small  volume 
to  explain  the  outlook  upon  Ufe  of  twelve  great  poets. 
Onh^  ideas  of  the  most  general  nature  can  be  given 
any  place  at  all  within  the  narrow  limits  to  which  he 
is  restricted;  he  hopes,  however,  that  so  far  as  his 
opportunities  have  reached,  he  may  be  found  to  have 
drawn  his  conclusions  fairly,  and  to  have  made  their 
statement  clear.  He  will,  at  least,  urge  for  his 
work  that  plea  of 

"II  limgo  studio  e  il  grande  amore" 

confessed  by  the  great  poet  of  the  Middle  Ages  for 
the  Master-singer  of  the  Latin  race. 

A  few  passages  contained  in  the  chapter  on  Swin- 
burne have  been  reproduced  from  the  author's  in- 
troduction to  Swinburne's  "Selected  Poems,"  as 
pubHshed  in  the  "Belles-Lettres  Series"  by  Messrs. 
D.  C.  Heath  &  Co. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

John  Keats 1 

Percy  Bysshe  Shelley 33 

George  Gordon  Byron 64 

•Samuel   Taylor  Coleridge 96 

fc^-^'^iLLiAM  Wordsworth 128 

Walter   Savage   Landor 139 

^•'^obert  Browning 192 

^.  Alfred  Tennyson 221 

-ffMATTHEw  Arnold {. .. .  25f 

Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti 284 

William    Morris 316 

Algernon  Charles  Swinburne 348 


3obn  lkeat0 

The  nineteenth  century  is  a  well-defined  period  in 
the  history  of  English  poetry,  and,  now  that  its 
accounts  have  been  definitely  closed,  the  occasion 
seems  fitting  to  undertake  a  review  of  its  contribu- 
tion to  the  highest  form  of  literary  art.  The 
Romantic  Movement  which,  in  its  various  phases, 
constitutes  so  large  a  part  of  the  century's  literary 
history,  whether  in  England  or  in  the  world  of  let- 
ters at  large,  may  be  said  to  have  been  ushered  in  for 
English  poetry  by  the  publication  of  the  "Lyrical 
Ballads"  in  1798.  The  one  great  poet  left  at  the  end 
of  the  century  to  the  English-speaking  race,  pub- 
lished, in  1899,  a  volume  which,  in  its  display  of 
restrained  and  ripened  art,  was  no  unworthy  addi- 
tion to  the  glorious  roll  of  nineteenth-century  Eng- 
lish poems.  Between  the  date  which  witnessed  the 
appearance  of  the  epoch-making  little  volume  in 
which  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  made  their  ten- 
tative proclamation  of  a  new  aesthetic  gospel,  and 
the  date  of  the  appearance  of  Mr.  Swinburne's 
"Rosamund,  Queen  of  the  Lombards,"  there  was 
worked  out  a  transformation  in  English  poetry,  its 
spirit  and  its  aims,  greater,  perhaps,  or,  if  not 
greater,  at  least  farther-reaching,  than  any  previous 


2  JOHN  KEATS 

transformation  in  the  history  of  our  Hterature.  It  will 
be  remarkable,  indeed,  if  the  twentieth  century  shall, 
with  respect  to  its  poetical  activity,  exhibit  as 
marked  a  departure  from  the  nineteenth,  as  the 
poetry  of  the  century  recently  ended  exhibits  from 
the  ideals  and  the  methods  of  the  one  preceding  it. 
It  is  true  that  the  romantic  eclosion  had  long  been 
preparing  at  the  time  when  the  "Lyrical  Ballads" 
saw  the  light.  We  understand  this  now  better  than 
it  could  have  been  understood  a  hundred  years  ago. 
In  the  first  place,  study  of  the  romantic  origins,  as 
illustrated  by  the  useful  Httle  book  of  Professor  W. 
L.  Phelps  and  the  more  comprehensive  work  of  Pro- 
fessor H.  A.  Beers  upon  the  same  subject,  has  gone 
much  further  in  our  own  day  than  it  could  have  gone 
at  a  time  when  the  possibilities  of  romanticism  were 
first  being  unfolded;  in  the  second  place,  the  concep- 
tion of  evolution  was  not  then,  as  it  is  now,  a  con- 
trolling influence  in  all  the  departments  of  human 
thought,  and  no  one,  a  hundred  years  ago,  could 
have  felt  as  we  now  feel  it,  the  imperative  intel- 
lectual necessity  of  accounting  for  so  startling  a 
series  of  poetical  productions  as  were  characteristic 
of  the  first  quarter  of  the  last  century.  What  to 
the  observer  of  a  hundred  years  ago  were  independent 
phenomena  appear  to  us  rather  as  links  in  the  causal 
sequence,  and  as  products  into  which  tradition  and 
environment  enter  for  no  inconsiderable  part. 

Be  that  as  it  may,  it  is  not  the  purpose  of  the 
present  work  to  inquire  too  curiously  into  the  causes 


JOHN  KEATS  S 

of  the  change  which  EngHsh  poetry  underwent  in 
the  age  of  Keats  and  Shelley,  of  Byron  and  Cole- 
ridge, of  Wordsworth  and  Landor.  It  is  rather 
my  purpose  to  consider  the  personalities  and  the 
works  of  these  six  poets,  and  of  the  six  other  poets, 
Arnold  and  Browning,  Tennyson  and  Rossetti,  Mor- 
ris and  Swinburne,  whose  influence  has  been  dominant 
in  the  English  poetry  of  the  latter  half  of  the  cen- 
tury. The  death  of  Wordsworth,  in  1850,  marks  the 
exact  division  of  the  century  into  halves,  and  each 
of  these  halves  has  its  group  of  six  poets.  The  fact 
that  Landor  outlived  by  some  fourteen  years  the 
first  of  these  terms,  does  not  seriously  interfere  with 
the  division  that  has  been  made,  for  the  bulk  of  his 
work  was  done  before  the  mid-year  of  the  century, 
and  his  associations  were  almost  wholly  with  the 
earlier  group  of  poets.  While  it  is  true  that  he  is 
in  a  measure  linked  to  the  later  period  by  his  relations 
with  Browning,  and  still  more  by  the  reverent  affec- 
tion toward  him  of  Mr.  Swinburne,  expressed  in 
many  a  tribute  from 

"The  youngest  to  the  oldest  singer 
That  England  bore," 

the  fact  remains  that  he  was  essentially  a  poet  of 
the  age  over  which  the  storm-cloud  of  the  Revolution 
had  passed,  leaving  its  new  bow  of  promise  in  the 
skies.  The  twelve  poets  that  have  been  named  are, 
then,  "The  Greater  English  Poets  of  the  Nineteenth 
Century,"  and  constitute  the  subject  of  the  present 


4  JOHN  KEATS 

volume.  The  century  had  many  other  poets  of  im- 
portance, no  doubt,  but,  after  weighing  carefully  the 
claims  of  all  other  possible  candidates,  it  has  seemed 
to  me  that  the  best  of  those  remaining  belong  dis- 
tinctly to  the  second  rank.  Even  the  great  name 
of  Scott,  when  we  think  of  him  as  a  poet,  is  over- 
shadowed by  the  names  already  mentioned  of  his  con- 
temporaries, and  we  cannot  but  approve  of  the  reso- 
lution which  led  him  to  give  up  the  attempt  to  com- 
pete with  the  growing  popularity  of  Byron,  and  to 
devote  himself  to  that  series  of  prose  romances  in 
which  his  wizardry  is  most  manifest  and  most  potent. 
The  names  of  Southey,  Moore,  and  Hood  are  not  to 
be  considered  very  seriously  in  this  connection,  and, 
coming  doA\Ti  nearer  to  our  own  times,  I  feel  no 
marked  compunctions  of  conscience,  except  in  the 
cases  of  the  two  women  whose  work  will  be  forever 
memorable  in  the  history  of  EngHsh  song.  But  for 
neither  Mrs.  Browning  nor  Miss  Rossetti  is  it  quite 
justifiable  to  advance  the  claim  that  should  place 
them  fully  upon  the  level  of  the  six  greater  names — 
the  dii  ma  J  ores — of  the  later  Victorian  period.  Fine 
as  is  their  work,  we  may  hardly  say  that  Mrs. 
Browning  was  the  poetic  equal  of  her  husband,  or 
Miss  Rossetti  of  her  brother.  My  subject,  then, 
seems  marked  out  with  reasonable  clearness  by  the 
facts  of  the  situation,  and,  in  the  case  at  least  of  all 
but  the  most  recent  of  our  greater  poets,  by  a  con- 
sensus of  critical  opinion  too  definite  and  pro- 
nounced to  be  at  this  day  open  to  revision. 


JOHN  KEATS  5 

Mr.  Mallock,  in  "The  New  Republic,"  makes  one 
of  his  characters  attribute  this  opinion  to  John 
Stuart  Mill :  "When  all  the  greater  evils  of  life  shall 
have  been  removed,  he  thinks  the  human  race  is  to 
find  its  chief  enjoyment  in  reading  Wordsworth's 
poetry."  What  Mill  really  did  say  was  that  from 
the  poems  of  Wordsworth  he  "seemed  to  learn  what 
would  be  the  perennial  sources  of  happiness,  when  all 
the  greater  evils  of  life  shall  have  been  removed." 
This  serious  view  of  the  function  of  poetry  finds 
many  expressions  in  English  literature,  all  the  way 
from  Sidney  to  Arnold.  It  is  in  Sidney's  "Apologia 
for  Poetrie"  that  we  find  these  words : 

"Sith  the  ever-praise-worthy  Poesie,  is  full  of  vertue-breeding 
delightfulness,  and  voyde  of  no  gyfte,  that  ought  to  be  in 
the  noble  name  of  learning:  sith  the  blames  laid  against  it, 
are  either  false,  or  feeble:  sith  the  cause  why  it  is  not  es- 
teemed in  Englande,  is  the  fault  of  Poet-apes,  not  poets:  sith 
lastly,  our  tongue  is  most  fit  to  honor  Poesie,  and  to  bee 
honored  by  Poesie,  I  conjure  you  all,  that  have  had  the  evill 
lucke  to  reade  this  incke-wasting  toy  of  mine,  even  in  the 
name  of  the  nyne  Muses,  no  more  to  scorne  the  sacred  misteries 
of  Poesie:  no  more  to  laugh  at  the  name  of  Poets,  as  though 
they  were  next  inheritours  to  Fooles:  no  more  to  jest  at  the 
reverent  title  of  a  Rymer:  but  to  beleeve  with  Aristotle, 
that  they  were  the  auncient  Treasurers,  of  the  Graecians 
Divinity.  To  beleeve  with  Bembus,  that  they  were  first 
bringers  in  of  all  civilitie.  To  beleeve  with  ScaUger,  that  no 
Philosophers  precepts  can  sooner  make  you  an  honest  man, 
then  the  reading  of  Virgill." 

Sidney's  faith  in  the  fitness  of  the  English  tongue 
"to  honor   Poesie,"   was   destined   to   receive   ample 


6  JOHN  KEATS 

justification  almost  during  his  own  lifetime.  When 
Shelley,  in  similar  strain,  undertook  a  new  and  less 
needed  "Defence  of  Poetry,"  he  had  for  inspiration 
not  only  the  achievements  of  the  English  past,  but 
also  the  resurgent  poetic  impulse  of  his  own  day  and 
generation.     "It  is  impossible,"  he  said, 

"to  read  the  compositions  of  the  most  celebrated  writers  of 
the  present  day  without  being  startled  with  the  electric  life 
which  burns  within  their  words.  They  measure  the  circum- 
ference and  sound  the  depths  of  human  nature  with  a  com- 
prehensive and  all-penetrating  spirit,  and  they  are  themselves 
perhaps  the  most  sincerely  astonished  at  its  manifestations; 
for  it  is  less  their  spirit  than  the  spirit  of  the  age.  Poets  are 
the  hierophants  of  an  unapprehended  inspiration;  the  mirrors 
of  the  gigantic  shadows  which  futurity  casts  upon  the  present; 
the  words  which  express  what  they  understand  not;  the 
trumpets  which  sing  to  battle,  and  feel  not  what  they  inspire; 
the  influence  which  is  moved  not,  but  moves.  Poets  are  the 
unacknowledged  legislators  of  the  world." 

This  view  of  the  high  seriousness  of  poetry  is  the 
one  which  I  wish  to  emphasise  in  the  following  dis- 
cussions. It  is  the  view  which  Arnold  emphasises 
when  he  calls  the  future  of  poetry  "immense,"  and 
tells  us  that  "we  should  conceive  of  it  as  capable  of 
higher  uses,  and  called  to  higher  destinies,  than  those 
which  in  general  men  have  assigned  to  it  hitherto." 
He  invokes  Wordsworth's  definition  of  poetry  as 
"the  breath  and  finer  spirit  of  all  knowledge,"  and 
echoes  Mill's  sentiment  when  he  says  that  "more  and 
more  mankind  will  discover  that  we  have  to  turn  to 
poetry  to  interpret  hfe  for  us,  to  console  us,  to  sus- 


JOHN  KEATS  7 

tain  us."  The  function  of  poetry  as  the  interpreter 
of  life  was,  as  we  all  know,  given  too  great  a  relative 
importance  by  Arnold,  for  it  found  its  final  expres- 
sion in  that  famous  and  much-discussed  dictum  to 
the  effect  that  poetry  is  a  "criticism  of  life,"  than 
which  no  definition  could  be  more  inadequate.  So  far 
from  being  merely  a  critical  commentary  upon  life, 
poetry  is  the  most  intense  and  direct  expression  of 
life  itself;  as  Shelley  says,  it  is  "the  very  image  of  life 
expressed  in  its  eternal  truth."  To  the  extent  to 
which  the  critical  element  enters  into  poetry,  we  may 
almost  say  that  its  real  appeal  becomes  weakened. 
Speaking  particularly  of  lyrical  poetry,  Pater  tells 
us  that  its  very  perfection  "often  seems  to  depend,  in 
part,  in  a  certain  suppression  or  vagueness  of  mere 
subject,  so  that  the  meaning  reaches  us  through  ways 
not  distinctly  traceable  by  the  understanding." 
Every  art,  poetry  as  well  as  the  others,  "constantly 
aspires  towards  the  condition  of  music,"  which  is 
"the  true  type  or  measure  of  perfected  art."  And 
W.  J.  Stillman  goes  so  far  as  to  say  that  all  ele- 
ments of  representative  art  which  have  no  analogies 
in  music,  are  necessarily  non-artistic  elements. 

These  considerations  might  seem  upon  first  thought 
to  lead  us  directly  into  the  company  of  those  who 
preach  the  doctrine  of  "art  for  art's  sake."  But  I 
would  not  be  understood  as  accepting  this  principle, 
for  it  is  the  broader  principle  of  "art  for  life's  sake" 
that  this  work  is  intended  to  illustrate.  The  advo- 
cates of  "art  for  art's  sake"  have  exerted  a  marked 


8  JOHN  KEATS 

influence  upon  criticism,  and  a  few  words  upon  their 
fundamental  dogma  may  not  be  out  of  place  at  this 
point.  If  we  consider  the  case  of  literary  art  alone, 
there  were  two  things  that  brought  much  support  to 
their  \aew.  The  first  was  the  fact  that  didacticism 
in  literature  had  been  greatly  overdone.  When  we 
think  of  the  long  and  dreary  annals  of  allegorical 
composition  and  sermonising  in  verse,  we  naturally 
revolt  from  the  assumption  that  this  sort  of  activity 
has  anything  to  do  with  literature  proper,  and  it 
gives  us  a  sense  of  satisfaction  to  take  refuge  in 
even  the  extreme  opinion  that  poetry  has  no  busi- 
ness to  teach  anything,  that  its  message  is  one  of 
pure  beauty,  and  that,  by  just  so  much  as  it  de- 
parts from  this  aim,  its  purpose  becomes  weakened 
and  its  spiritual  power  impaired.  The  second  reason 
which  seemed  to  justify  the  principle  of  "art  for 
art's  sake,"  was  offered  by  those  over-zealous  critics 
of  literature  who  were  constantly  dragging  petty 
personalities  into  their  work,  raising  a  great  pother 
over  the  superficial  aspects  of  a  poet's  private  life, 
and  making  out  of  some  carelessness  of  habit  or  fault 
of  temper  a  structural  defect  in  character  which 
must  always  be  kept  in  the  foreground  of  thought 
when  the  poet's  work  was  under  consideration.  It  | 
was  no  wonder  that  these  two  influences  combined  drove 
many  sensitive  intelligences  to  the  extreme  of  revolt.  I 
The  fact  that,  on  the  one  hand,  such  didacticism  as  \ 
Young's  "Night  Thoughts"  and  Pollok's  "Course 
of  Time"  could  pass  for  poetry  at  all,  and  that,  on   i 


JOHN  KEATS  9 

the  other,  whole  sections  of  the  reading  public  should 
be  warned  against  the  poetry  of  Byron  and  Shelley 
because  their  lives  did  not  square  with  the  social  con- 
ventions of  their  time — this  twofold  fact,  I  say, 
based  upon  a  false  perspective  and  a  complete  mis- 
understanding of  the  poetic  art,  was  amply  suffi- 
cient to  account  for  the  success  of  a  form  of  doc- 
trine whose  fundamental  object  was  to  restore  to 
poetry  the  dignity  which  it  seemed  to  be  in  danger 
of  losing. 

When,  however,  we  come  to  take  a  broader  view  of 
the  whole  question,  it  must  be  admitted  that  the  doc- 
trine of  "art  for  art's  sake,"  the  doctrine  that  the 
artist  must  deliberately  eschew  the  intention  of  teach- 
ing, that,  if  he  have  the  divine  fire  within  him,  the 
purity  of  its  glow  will  remain  undimmed  whatever  the 
life  he  may  lead,  is  almost  as  narrow  as  the  doctrine 
against  which  it  was  raised  in  protest.  Because  cer- 
tain dull  poets  have  been  offensively  didactic,  we  have 
no  right  to  say  that  poets  of  genius  may  not  engage 
their  powers  in  the  furtherance  of  worthy  ideals. 
That  some  great  poets  have  had  personal  failings, 
about  which  their  critics  have  been  more  curious  than 
was  necessary,  is  no  reason  why  we  should  deny  that, 
other  things  being  equal,  the  blameless  life  will  in  the 
long  run  express  itself  in  nobler  forms  than  the  life 
that  has  not  escaped  "the  contagion  of  the  world's 
slow  stain."  As  far  as  the  latter  of  these  two  prop- 
ositions is  concerned,  we  take  a  just  pride  in  the 
thought  that  Milton  and  Tennyson  were  no  less  great 


10  JOHN  KEATS 

as  men  than  as  poets,  and,  while  giving  full  accept- 
ance as  poetry  to  the  work  of  men  whose  character 
we  may  not  call  unblemished,  it  would  distinctly  add 
to  our  satisfaction  could  we  know  them  to  have 
lived  lives  in  stricter  consonance  with  their  ideals. 
As  for  the  former  proposition,  we  need  only  point, 
as  Swinburne  does  in  a  passage  here  substantially 
reproduced,  to  the  long  line  of  great  poets  who  have 
allied  their  work  with  the  practical  human  causes  of 
religious  and  ethical  teaching,  of  pohtical  and  social 
progress.  From  the  defence  of  the  Areopagus  and 
the  old  conservative  order  by  JEschylus  to  the  de- 
nunciation by  Hugo  of  the  saturnalia  of  a  bastard 
French  imperialism,  the  most  famous  of  poets  have 
always  been  ready — have  found  themselves  irresisti- 
bly impelled — to  make  their  work  tell  in  the  never- 
ending  struggle  between  truth  and  error,  between 
right  and  wrong,  between  the  conservative  and  the 
destructive  agencies  in  the  life  of  the  social  organism. 
If  we  make  our  definitions  sufficiently  liberal,  it  is 
probable  that  "art's  sake"  and  "life's  sake"  will 
be  found  synonymous.  The  essential  unity  of  the 
good,  the  true,  and  the  beautiful,  has  long  been 
proverbial,  and  Goethe,  taking  "the  true"  for 
granted,  gave  to  this  formula  the  still  more  compre- 
hensive form  of  "the  whole,  the  good,  and  the  beauti- 
ful." Abjuring  all  faltering  and  inadequate  ideals 
of  life,  he  set  himself  with  firm  resolve  to  realise  this 
threefold  aim,  and  sounded  the  note  of  a  conception 
of  culture  which  answers  to  the  fullest  spiritual  de- 


JOHN  KEATS  11 

mands  of  our  modern  age.  In  the  final  synthesis, 
beauty  and  truth  and  virtue  are  one  and  the  same 
thing,  and  the  "art's  sake"  shibboleth  appears  but  a 
question-begging  phrase.  We  cannot  judge  the 
artist  without,  in  large  measure,  taking  account  of 
the  man  as  well,  and  of  the  message  which  he  has  to 
convey;  our  reckoning  must  include  both  his  out- 
look upon  the  world  of  thought  and  action  and  the 
nature  of  the  personality  wherein,  as  in  a  mirror, 
that  world  is  reflected.  The  personalities  and  the 
works  of  the  great  poets  are  con-substantial,  says 
Professor  Corson,  and  we  may  add  that  their  works 
are  shaped  in  no  slight  degree  by  the  social  and 
intellectual  pressure  of  the  times  in  which  they  are 
written. 

If  the  creation  of  pure  beauty  were  the  sole  aim 
of  poetry,  such  dicta  as  those  which  I  have  quoted 
from  Mill  and  Arnold  would  find  sufficient  justifica- 
tion ;  how  much  more,  then,  is  this  the  case  if  we  find 
in  poetry  not  only  that  beauty  which  the  soul  craves, 
but  also,  without  any  sacrifice  of  the  aesthetic  ideal, 
we  find  conjoined  with  beauty  a  wise  commentary 
upon  the  age,  a  ripe  philosophy,  and  a  worthy  ethic. 
It  may  be  said  that  this  is  impossible,  that  these 
things  are  absolutely  incompatible  with  the  true  aims 
of  poetry.  I  admit  that  the  combination  is  difficult, 
and  that  the  poet  who  deliberately  sets  out  to  make 
it  will  most  likely  come  to  grief.  I  admit,  moreover, 
that  when  we  find  such  things  in  poetry,  a  justifia- 
ble suspicion  arises  that  we  are  being  practised  upon. 


12  JOHN  KEATS 

But  at  the  same  time  I  insist  that  when  these  things — 
philosophy,  ethics,  and  the  Hke — are  properly  im- 
plicit, as  they  should  be,  and  not  forced  upon  us  in 
the  forms  of  explicit  utterance,  they  are  not  out  of 
place  even  in  poetry  of  the  highest  sort.  Practically 
all  the  great  poets  bear  witness  to  this  conclusion. 
They  are,  in  Mrs.  Browning's  familiar  words, 

"The  only  truth-tellers  now  left  to  God, 
The  only  speakers  of  essential  truth. 
Opposed  to  relative,  comparative. 
And  temporal  truths;  the  only  holders  by 
His  sun-skirts,  through  conventional  grey  glooms; 
The  only  teachers  who  instruct  mankind. 
From  just  a  shadow  on  the  charnel  wall. 
To  find  man's  venerable  stature  out, 
Erect,  sublime, — the  measure  of  a  man." 

Allowing  all  this,  however,  let  me  say  once  more  that 
the  first  and  foremost  aim  of  poetry  is  to  be  beauti- 
ful, to  arouse  the  aesthetic  emotions,  to  address  the 
soul  through  a  subtler  medium  than  that  of  the  mere 
intelligence. 

I  have  indulged  myself  in  this  repetition  because 
I  wish  the  proposition  to  be  kept  in  mind  throughout 
this  work,  and  taken  for  granted  all  the  while.  For 
my  purpose  is  not  that  of  examining  the  greater 
poets  of  the  century  in  the  light  of  this  principle  so 
much  as  that  of  considering  them  with  reference  to 
their  content.  While  denying  that  "criticism  of 
life"  affords  a  definition  of  poetry  even  approxi- 
mately adequate,  I  intend,  nevertheless,  to  devote  my 
discussion  mainly  to  that  aspect  of  the  subject  which 


JOHN  KEATS  13 

this  phrase  indicates.  Our  modern  poets  have  been 
made  the  subject  of  so  much  criticism  of  the  "ht- 
erary"  or  strictly  aesthetic  sort,  that  I  should  despair 
of  finding  anything  new  to  say  about  them  from  that 
point  of  view.  Certainly  in  the  case  of  the  older 
group  the  main  points  have  been  decided,  and  a  fairly 
definitive  judgment  pronounced.  If  controversy  con- 
cerning the  rank  of  Byron  is  still  in  the  acrimonious 
stage,  and  if  the  question  of  primacy,  as  between 
Shelley  and  Wordsworth,  still  remains  an  open  one, 
there  is  substantial  agreement  among  critics  con- 
cerning the  stylistic  and  other  technical  qualities  of 
these  poets.  But  concerning  the  content  of  their 
work,  their  outlook  upon  the  world  about  them  and 
the  larger  aspects  of  human  life,  their  relation  to 
the  main  currents  of  modern  thought  and  the  main 
phases  of  modern  social  activity,  their  envisagement 
of  the  problems  of  science  and  philosophy,  of  society 
and  politics,  of  religion  and  the  conduct  of  life,  some- 
what less  has  been  said  and  written ;  and  it  is  to  these 
matters  that  I  wish  chiefly  to  direct  attention.  "I 
hate  both  poetry  and  wine  without  body,"  said  Lan- 
dor  in  his  vehement  way.  I  am  so  far  from  sharing 
in  this  antipathy  that  the  lyrics  of  the  "Prometheus 
Unbound"  seem  to  me  to  outweigh  in  absolute  value 
all  the  abstract  philosophising  of  "The  Excursion," 
but  man  does  not  live  by  lyrics  alone,  and  the  poetry 
which  has  a  definite  message,  which  ministers  to  the 
deeper  spiritual  needs,  is  not  to  be  slighted  merely 
because  it  attempts  something  more  than  the  raptu- 


14  JOHN  KEATS 

rous  outpouring  of  melody.  At  all  events,  it  is  the 
"body"  of  nineteenth-century  English  poetry,  rather 
than  its  technique,  that  I  wish  to  examine,  and  this 
in  the  light  of  the  entire  utterance  of  our  poets,  their 
personality,  the  form  and  pressure  of  their  environ- 
ment. 

Of  our  twelve  poets,  John  Keats,  although  the 
youngest  of  the  earlier  group,  was  the  one  whose 
work  was  first  completed.  For  this  reason,  I  give 
him  the  first  place,  as  well  as  for  the  reason  that  his 
life  was  so  brief,  the  amount  of  his  work  so  Umited, 
and  the  purely  artistic  element  in  his  nature  so  pre- 
dominant, that  there  is  less  to  say  of  him  from  the 
point  of  view  that  I  have  chosen  than  there  is  of 
any  of  the  others.  The  restricted  space  that  re- 
mains for  this  chapter,  now  that  the  necessary  pre- 
liminaries have  been  disposed  of,  seems  more  nearly 
sufficient  to  deal  with  Keats  than  it  would  be  to  deal 
with  Shelley,  or  Byron,  or  Wordsworth.  Born  in  a 
London  stable,  in  1795,  he  received  only  the  begin- 
nings of  an  education,  was  apprenticed  to  an  apoth- 
ecary, lived  for  a  few  years  in  the  cherished  intimacy 
of  a  small  circle  of  friends,  varying  the  monotony 
of  London  by  an  occasional  excursion  into  the  coun- 
try, felt  the  poetic  impulse  growing  stronger  and 
stronger  within  him,  published  three  small  volumes  of 
verse,  experienced  the  overmastering  passion  of  love, 
and,  at  a  time  when  his  life  seemed  filled  with  the 
fairest  promise,  was  overtaken  by  a  fatal  disease.  A 
journey  to  Italy,  which  did  not  avail  to  stay  the 


JOHN  KEATS  15 

rapid  progress  of  his  malady,  brought  him  to  his 
deathbed,  in  Rome,  in  1821.  He  was  buried  in  the 
Protestant  Cemetery  in  the  shadow  of  the  pyramid 
of  Caius  Cestius.  In  a  moment  of  depression,  he  had 
requested  that  the  words,  "Here  hes  one  whose  name 
was  writ  in  water,"  should  be  the  inscription  upon 
his  gravestone.  This  sentiment  was  not  the  expres- 
sion of  his  better  self.  That  expression  is  found  in 
the  words  of  a  letter  which  he  wrote  in  the  full 
flush  of  health:  "I  think  I  shall  be  among  the  Eng- 
lish poets  after  my  death."  Concerning  this,  Mat- 
thew Arnold  says :  "He  is,  he  is  with  Shakespeare." 

Keats  came  to  manhood  and  artistic  self-conscious- 
ness at  the  time  when  England  was  engaged  in  the 
last  act  of  the  great  drama  of  anti-Napoleonic  war- 
fare. For  a  full  quarter  of  a  century  she  had  been 
engaged  in  the  struggle  for  the  preservation  of 
European  liberty.  The  Corsican  brigand  had  ended 
his  career  at  Waterloo,  and  the  Congress  at  Vienna 
had  done  its  fatuous  work.  England,  no  less  than 
the  rest  of  Europe,  had  known  to  the  full  the  curse 
of  militarism,  and  its  burdens  weighed  heavily  upon 
all  classes  of  society.  It  is  proverbial  that  the  laws 
are  silent  amid  the  clash  of  arms,  and  it  is  equally 
true  that  there  is  no  hope  of  social  progress  for  a 
nation  whose  energies  are  preoccupied  with  the  busi- 
ness of  fighting.  The  Revolution  had  defeated  itself 
by  its  own  excesses.  The  humanitarian  impulse  which 
had  been  well  under  way  in  the  later  eighteenth  cen- 
tury had  lapsed,  and  England  was  in  worse  case,  both 


16  JOHN  KEATS 

socially  and  morally,  than  she  had  been  for  many 
years.  It  was  an  age  of  intolerable  taxation,  and 
the  masses  of  the  people  found  it  difficult  to  obtain 
for  themselves  the  bare  necessaries  of  life.  It  was 
an  age  of  criminal  legislation  so  savage  that  more 
than  two  hundred  capital  offences  were  designated 
upon  the  statute-book.  It  was  an  age  of  foul  prisons 
and  brutal  forms  of  punishment.  It  was  an  age 
when  actual  slavery  was  sanctioned  in  the  colonies, 
and  conditions  closely  approaching  slavery  were  fa- 
miliar at  home.  It  was  an  age  when  factory  legis- 
lation was  unknown,  when  the  monstrous  e\al  of  child 
labor  was  unchecked,  and  when  men  and  women  toiled 
long  hours  to  gain  the  miserable  pittance  upon  which 
their  existence  was  supported.  It  was  an  age  of 
beggars  and  epidemics,  of  coarse  manners  and  illit- 
eracy. It  was  an  age  in  which  people  still  travelled 
by  stagecoaches,  and  in  which  most  of  the  comforts 
and  conveniences  which  we  take  as  a  matter  of  course 
were  unknown.  It  was  an  age  of  venal  poHtics,  of 
rotten  boroughs,  and  of  exaggerated  distinctions  be- 
tween the  different  classes  of  society.  It  would  seem 
that  such  conditions  as  these  should  have  aroused  the 
indignation  and  invoked  the  sympathies  of  a  poet; 
we  shall  see  later  how  they  did  influence  the  poetical 
activities  of  Shelley  and  Byron.  Upon  Keats  they 
seem  to  have  made  no  very  deep  impression.  We 
can  find  in  all  of  liis  writings  only  a  faint  occasional 
echo  of  the  social  distress  of  his  times.  So  complete 
was  his  intellectual  detachment,  so  absolute  was  his 


JOHN  KEATS  17 

absorption  in  the  considerations  of  art,  that  we  are 
surprised  when,  in  "Isabella,"  we  find  so  mild  an  in- 
dictment of  purse-proud  arrogance  as  is  implied  in 
this  series  of  questions  concerning  the  two  brothers 
of  the  heroine. 

"Why  were  they  proud?    Because  their  marble  founts 
Gush'd  with  more  pride  than  do  a  wretch's  tears? — 

Why  were  they  proud?     Because  fair  orange-mounts 
Were  of  more  soft  ascent  than  lazar  stairs? — 

Why  were  they  proud?    Because  red-lined  accounts 
Were  richer  than  the  songs  of  Grecian  years? — 

Why  were  they  proud?  again  we  ask  aloud. 

Why  in  the  name  of  Glory  were  they  proud?" 

I  would  not  be  considered  as  casting  even  the  faintest 
shadow  of  reproach  upon  Keats  for  the  failure  to 
reflect  in  his  verse  any  of  the  aspects  of  contemporary 
life.  He  was  hardly  more  than  a  boy,  and  he  had 
more  than  the  usual  exuberance  of  youth.  He  felt 
that  his  own  sacred  mission  was  that  of  shaping 
speech  into  forms  of  everlasting  beauty ;  he  knew  that 
this  power  was  his,  and  he  believed  that  by  its  exer- 
cise he  could  best  serve  the  interests  of  his  fellow 
man.  Not  unacquainted  with  "the  weariness,  the 
fever,  and  the  fret"  of  life,  he  used  these  things  for 
what  we  may  call  the  emotional  decoration  of  his 
verse,  and  not  as  themes  for  an  impassioned  appeal 
to  the  hearts  of  his  readers.  Professor  Masson 
speaks  of  two  orders  of  poets.  The  peculiarity  of 
one  "is  that  their  poems  are  vehicles  for  certain 
fixed  ideas  lying  in  the  minds  of  their  authors,  out- 
bursts  of  their  personal  character,  impersonations 


18  JOHN  KEATS 

under  shifting  guises  of  their  wishes,  feelings,  and 
beHefs."  The  poets  of  the  second  order  "simply 
fashion  their  creations  by  a  kind  of  inventive  craft, 
working  amid  materials  supplied  by  sense,  memory, 
and  reading,  without  the  distinct  infusion  of  any 
element  of  personal  opinion."  It  is  evident  that 
Keats  is  a  poet  of  this  second  order.  He  is  the 
typical  poet  of  "art  for  art's  sake,"  in  the  best  sense 
of  that  expression.  Rejecting  the  obligation  to  teach 
otherwise  than  implicitly,  and  the  obligation  to  re- 
flect common  life  otherwise  than  incidentally,  he  gets 
his  inspiration  from  the  great  masters  of  poetry, 
from  classical  or  mediaeval  legend,  and  penetrates 
with  wonderful  certainty  to  secrets  of  which  scholar- 
ship is  popularly  supposed  to  guard  the  approach. 
His  genius  is  as  great  a  mystery  as  that  of  Shakes- 
peare. Possibly  some  future  expert  in  "the  nidifica- 
tion  of  mare's  nests"  may  argue  learnedly,  in  the  face 
of  all  the  evidence,  that  a  man  of  Keats's  limited  edu- 
cation could  not  possible  have  written  "Hyperion," 
just  as  it  has  been  gravely  argued,  in  the  face  of 
equally  unimpeachable  evidence,  that  the  man  whose 
education  was  confined  to  what  he  learned  in  the 
Stratford  grammar  school  could  not  possibly  have 
written  "Hamlet"  and  "The  Tempest."  The  argu- 
ment seems  to  be  that,  since  many  persons  who  have 
enjoyed  liberal  educations  administered  in  the  ortho- 
dox way  have,  nevertheless,  failed  to  write  "Ham- 
lets" and  "Hjrperions,"  no  one  who  has  not  had  these 
advantages   could  possibly  have  done  anything  of 


i 


JOHN*  KEATS  19 

the  sort.  Genius,  however,  has  a  way  of  achieving 
its  purposes  by  means  unknown  to  pedagogy,  and 
what  it  was  possible  for  Keats  to  accomplish  with  so 
rude  a  tool  as  Lempriere's  "Classical  Dictionary," 
may,  nevertheless,  remain  entirely  beyond  the  reach 
of  the  student  who  has  achieved  distinction  in  the 
most  thorough  schools  of  classical  philology. 
Shakespeare,  likewise,  although  his  "small  Latin  and 
less  Greek"  has  been  too  much  insisted  upon,  was 
assuredly  not  a  classical  scholar  in  the  technical 
sense,  but  he  had  read  "North's  "Plutarch,"  and  to 
some  purpose,  as  the  Roman  plays  sufficiently  testify. 
Coming  back  to  the  question  of  the  relation  in 
which  Keats  stood  toward  the  age  in  which  he  lived, 
we  see  that  he  absolutely  rejected  the  notion  that  it 
is  a  poet's  business  to  take,  as  some  people  will  always 
insist  that  poets  should  take,  "the  ideas,  manners, 
and  customs  of  his  own  time,  and  in  his  poetic  imag- 
ination weigh  the  essential  and  assign — in  some 
measure,  at  least — the  things  of  to-day  to  their 
places  in  cosmic  development."  This  particular 
formula  was  given  us  by  a  writer  in  The  Saturday 
RevieWy  who  objected  to  the  pure  beauty  of  the 
"Paolo  and  Francesca"  of  Mr.  Stephen  Phillips,  just 
as  he  would  doubtless  have  objected  to  the  pure  beauty 
of  "Hyperion."  He  developed  his  programme  in  the 
following  terms: 

"The  poet  must  grapple  with  underground  railways,  crowded 
public-houses,  with  vast  neighbourhoods  inhabited  by  jabber- 
ing human  beasts,  with  A.  B.  C.  restaurants,  the  Stock  Ex- 


20  JOHN  KEATS 

change,  with  parti-coloured  Whitechapel  High  Street,  the 
ranting  daily  papers,  telephones,  telegraphs,  mutoscopes,  music- 
halls,  street-women,  Hampstead  artistic  nibbling,  Clapham 
chapels.  Crouch  End,  Atlas  omnibuses,  OljTiipia,  Parliament, 
the  Yiddish  group  of  Anarchists, — the  whole  pell-mell  of  our 
modern  Hfe,  without  even  going  out  of  London." 

I  quote  this  programme  as  an  illustration  of  the 
extremes  to  which  the  mad  demand  for  realism  in 
art  can  go,  and  as  giving  us  occasion  for  renewed 
thankfulness  that  Keats  had  no  such  conception  of 
the  poetic  function.  When  we  read  the  letters  of 
Keats,  especially  those  written  during  the  last  three 
years  of  his  life,  we  discover  that  he  was  not  without 
a  healthy  interest  in  the  political  and  social  con- 
ditions of  his  age,  although  he  never  dreamed  of 
finding  in  them  the  material  for  poetry.  In  his  poems 
we  shall  hardly  find  anything  more  political  than 
the  praiseworthy  but  vague  sentiment  of  the  fol- 
lowing lines: 

"In  the  long  vista  of  the  years  to  roll 

Let  me  not  see  our  country's  honour  fade: 
O  let  me  see  our  land  retain  her  soul. 
Her  pride,  her  freedom;  and  not  freedom's  shade." 

But  when  we  turn  to  his  prose,  we  now  and  then  come 
across  passages  which  indicate  that  he  is  at  least 
feeling  his  way  toward  a  definite  philosophical  out- 
look upon  history  and  modern  life.  We  find  this 
passage,  for  instance: 

"I  have  been  reading  lately  two  very  diflFerent  books,  Robert- 
son's America  and  Voltaire's  Si^cle  de  Louis  XIV.    It  is  like 


JOHN  KEATS  21 

walking  arm  and  arm  between  Pizarro  and  the  great-little 
Monarch.  In  how  lamentable  a  case  we  see  the  great  body  of 
the  people  in  both  instances;  in  the  first  when  Men  might  seem 
to  inherit  quiet  of  Mind  from  unsophisticated  senses,  from 
uncontamination  of  civilisation,  and  especially  from  their  beiifg 
as  it  were  estrayed  from  the  mutual  helps  of  Society  and  its 
mutual  injuries — and  thereby  more  immediately  under  the  Pro- 
tection of  Providence — even  there  they  had  mortal  pains  to 
bear  as  bad,  or  worse  even  than  Bailiffs,  Debts,  and  Poverties 
of  civilised  Life.  The  whole  appears  to  resolve  into  this — that 
Man  is  originally  a  poor  forked  creature  subject  to  the  same 
mischances  as  the  beasts  of  the  forest,  destined  to  hardships 
and  disquietude  of  some  kind  or  other.  If  he  improves  by 
degrees  his  bodily  accommodations  and  comforts — at  each 
stage,  at  each  accent  there  are  waiting  for  him  a  fresh  set  of 
annoyances — he  is  mortal  and  there  is  still  a  heaven  with  its 
stars  above  his  head." 

There  is  nothing  very  profound  about  this,  to  be 
sure;  it  is  nothing  more  than  the  vague  pessimism 
that  overtakes  almost  every  young  man,  when  the 
mood  is  upon  him,  and  he  begins  to  think  seriously 
about  the  meaning  of  life.  We  find  a  more  direct 
reflection  of  the  poet's  immediate  surroundings  in 
the  following  passage: 

"The  example  of  England  and  the  liberal  writers  of  France 
and  England  sowed  the  seeds  of  opposition  to  tyranny,  and  it 
was  swelling  in  the  ground  till  it  burst  out  in  the  French 
Revolution.  That  has  had  an  unlucky  termination.  It  put  a 
stop  to  the  rapid  progress  of  free  sentiments  in  England,  and 
gave  our  Court  hopes  of  turning  back  to  the  despotism  of  the 
sixteenth  century.  They  have  made  a  handle  of  this  event  in 
every  way  to  undermine  our  freedom.  They  spread  a  horrid 
superstition  against  all  innovation  and  improvement.  The 
present  struggle  in  England  of  the  people  is  to  destroy  this 
superstition.    What  has  roused  them  to  do  it  is  their  distress." 


22  JOHN  KEATS 

Certain  passages  which  occur  in  a  long  letter  dated 
1818,  and  written  by  Keats  to  his  brother  in  America, 
seem  to  me  to  afford  on  the  whole  the  most  inter- 
esting reflex  of  his  political  opinion  to  be  found  any- 
where in  his  writings. 

"The  long-continued  peace  of  England,"  he  writes,  "has  given 
us  notions  of  personal  safety  which  are  likely  to  prevent  the 
reestablishment  of  our  national  honesty.  There  is  of  a  truth 
nothing  manly  or  sterling  in  any  part  of  the  Government.  .  .  . 
NotvN'ithstanding  the  noise  the  Liberals  make  in  the  cause  of 
Napoleon,  I  cannot  but  think  he  has  done  more  harm  to  the 
life  of  Liberty  than  any  one  else  could  have  done.  Not  that 
the  Divine  Right  gentlemen  have  done  or  intend  to  do  any 
good — no,  they  have  taken  the  lesson  of  him,  and  will  do  all 
the  further  harm  he  would  have  done,  without  any  of  the 
good." 

There  is  even  something  of  successful  political 
prophecy  in  what  follows: 

"The  Emperor  Alexander,  it  is  said,  intends  to  divide  his 
Empire,  as  did  Dioclesian — creating  two  czars  beside  himself, 
and  continuing  supreme  monarch  of  the  whole.  Should  he  do 
so,  and  they  for  a  series  of  years  keep  peaceable  among  them- 
selves, Russia  may  spread  her  conquest  even  to  China — I  think 
it  a  very  likely  thing  that  China  may  fall  of  itself;  Turkey 
certainly  will.  Meanwhile  European  North  Russia  will  hold 
its  horn  against  the  rest  of  Europe,  intriguing  constantly  with 
France." 

It  would  have  been  well  for  the  writer's  reputation  for 
sagacity  had  he  been  content  to  stop  with  this  re- 
markable prediction.  But  he  goes  on  to  say  things 
which  we  as  Americans  may  be  justified  in  resenting. 


JOHN  KEATS  «3 

"Dilke,  whom  you  know  to  be  a  Godwin-perfectibility  man, 
pleases  himself  with  the  idea  that  America  will  be  the  comitry 
to  take  up  the  human  intellect  where  England  leaves  off.  I 
differ  there  with  him  greatly — a  country  like  the  United  States, 
whose  greatest  men  are  Franklins  and  Washingtons,  will  never 
do  that.  They  are  great  men,  doubtless,  but  how  are  they  to 
be  compared  to  these  our  countrymen,  Milton  and  the  two 
Sidneys?  The  one  is  a  philosophical  Quaker,  full  of  mean 
and  thrifty  maxims;  the  other  sold  the  very  charger  who  had 
taken  him  through  all  his  Battles.  These  Americans  are  great, 
but  they  are  not  sublime,  men;  the  humanity  of  the  United 
States  can  never  reach  the  sublime."    T^  '^  ^ 

A  careful  examination  of  the  correspondence  of 
Keats  would  disclose  a  few  other  passages,  more  or 
less  suggestive,  in  which  his  outlook  upon  the  world 
of  action  finds  expression.  But  his  letters  are  for 
the  most  part  as  subjective  as  his  poems.  When 
they  make  an  occasional  excursion  into  philosophy, 
the  writer  is  obviously  out  of  his  depth,  and  flounders 
aimlessly  about.  It  is  not  for  matters  of  this  sort 
that  we  read  and  enjoy  the  letters  of  Keats.  Their 
charm  is  provided  by  their  peculiarly  intimate  char- 
acter, their  gossip,  their  small  talk,  their  rollicking 
humour,  their  youthful  exuberance  of  feeling,  and 
their  keen  literary  criticism.  We  find  in  them  neither 
a  message  nor  a  body  of  doctrine.  We  cherish  them 
most  of  all  for  their  occasional  revelations  of  the 
poet's  proud  consciousness  of  his  own  powers,  of  his 
absolute  absorption  in  the  art  to  which  his  life 
was  dedicated.  "I  find  I  cannot  exist  without  Poetry 
— without  eternal  Poetry ;  half  the  day  will  not  do — 
the  whole  of  it;  I  began  with  a  little,  but  habit  has 


24  JOHN  KEATS 

made  me  a  leviathan."  "I  feel  more  and  more  every 
day,  as  my  imagination  strengthens,  that  I  do  not 
live  in  this  world  alone  but  in  a  thousand  worlds.'-' 
"I  have  not  the  slightest  feeling  of  humiHty  towards 
the  public  or  to  anything  in  existence  but  the  Eternal 
Being,  the  Principle  of  Beauty,  and  the  Memory 
of  great  Men."  Such  passages  as  these  should 
eflPectively  dispose  of  the  legend,  if  it  still  finds  any 
believers,  that  the  savage  attacks  of  the  reviewers 
upon  his  work  impaired  his  self-confidence  and  has- 
tened his  death.  He  "had  flint  and  iron  in  him,"  as 
Arnold  says,  and,  although  he  was  keenly  sensitive 
to  criticism,  he  knew  his  powers  too  well  to  be  dis- 
heartened by  the  vulgarity  which  counselled  him 
to  forsake  poetry  and  go  back  to  his  pills  and  oint- 
ments. After  all,  with  the  exception  of  the  review 
in  Blackwood^Sy  which  was  too  ill-natured  and 
virulent  to  have  any  great  influence,  Keats  did  not 
fare  so  badly  at  the  hands  of  the  critics.  It  must 
be  borne  in  mind  that  his  work,  with  all  its  beauties, 
had  very  obvious  defects ;  the  trouble  with  the  re- 
viewers was  that  they  had  not  the  sympathy  to  see 
what  Leigh  Hunt  saw  when  he  wrote:  "The  very 
faults  of  Mr.  Keats  arise  from  a  passion  for  beauties, 
and  a  young  impatience  to  vindicate  them."  The 
Quarterly  Review  article  does  not  seem  to  us  so 
very  severe;  it  is  written  in  a  vein  of  mild  sarcasm, 
but  it  displays  no  very  marked  prejudice.  And 
Jeff'reys  was  by  no  means  unjust  when  he  wrote  of 
Keats  in  The  Edinburgh  Reviexv:  "He  deals  too  much 


JOHN  KEATS  25 

with  shadowy  and  incomprehensible  beings,  and  is 
too  constantly  rapt  into  an  extra-mundane  Elysium, 
to  command  a  lasting  interest  with  ordinary  mor- 
tals." Byron  proved  himself  even  more  vulgar  than 
the  critic  of  the  "Cockney  School  of  Poetry,"  when  in 
one  of  his  letters  he  called  the  poet  "A  tadpole  of  the 
Lakes,"  and  added:  "No  more  Keats,  I  entreat, — 
flay  him  alive, — if  some  of  you  don't,  I  must  skin 
him  myself.  There  is  no  bearing  the  drivelling  idiot- 
ism  of  the  manikin."  After  the  death  of  Keats, 
Byron  made  a  tardy  acknowledgment  of  his  mistaken 
judgment,  but  the  whole  episode  does  no  credit  to 
his  memory.  We  may,  however,  be  thankful  for  the 
very  virulence  of  the  critical  onslaught  which  made 
Keats  its  victim,  for  without  it  there  would  have 
been  no  "Adonais"  in  English  poetry,  and  "Lycidas" 
would  have  been  without  a  rival. 

The  three  thin  volumes  in  which  Keats  gave  to 
the  world  the  work  of  his  creation  constitute  one 
of  the  choicest  treasures  of  English  song. 

"O  for  ten  years,  that  I  may  overwhelm 
Myself  in  poesy," 

was  his  passionate  prayer;  only  about  five  years 
were  vouchsafed  him,  and,  when  we  note  the  rapid 
growth  of  his  powers,  when  we  contrast  the  flickering 
beauty  of  the  "Endymion"  with  the  high  sublimity 
of  the  "Hyperion,"  or  with  the  faultless  supremacy 
of  the  "Odes,"  we  are  almost  awe-stricken  at  the 
thought  of  what  five  more  years  might  have  done  for 


26  JOHN  KEATS 

the  development  of  his  genius.  The  cases  of  Mar- 
lowe and  Shelley  afford  the  only  parallels  to  the  loss 
suffered  by  Enghsh  poetry  in  the  premature  death 
of  Keats.  What  poetry  meant  to  him  finds  its  best 
and  fullest  statement  in  that  confession  of  faith 
which  may  be  found  in  his  first  published  volume. 

"What  though  I  am  not  wealthy  in  the  dower 
Of  spanning  wisdom;  though  I  do  not  know 
The  shifting  of  the  mighty  winds  that  blow 
Hither  and  thither  all  the  changing  thoughts 
Of  man;  though  no  great  ministering  reason  sorts 
Out  the  dark  mysteries  of  human  souls 
To  clear  conceiving:  yet  there  ever  rolls 
A  vast  idea  before  me,  and  I  glean 
Therefrom  my  liberty;  then  too  I've  seen 
The  end  and  aim  of  Poesy.    'Tis  clear 
As  anything  most  true;  as  that  the  year 
Is  made  of  the  four  seasons — manifest 
As  a  large  cross,  some  old  cathedral's  crest. 
Lifted  to  the  white  clouds." 

There  was  a  time  when  English  poetry  had  meant 
all  that  the  most  clear-visioned  votary  of  the  art 
could  wish.  "Here  her  altar  shone,  E'en  in  this  isle," 
but  the  traditions  of  her  earlier  priesthood  had  been 
forgotten  and  "a  schism  Nurtured  by  foppery  and 
barbarism.  Made  great  Apollo  blush  for  this  his 
land." 

"Men  were  thought  wise  who  could  not  understand 
His  glories;  with  a  puling  infant's  force 
They  sway'd  about  upon  a  rocking  horse. 
And  thought  it  Pegasus.    Ah,  dismal  soul'd ! 
The  winds  of  heaven  blew,  the  ocean  roll'd 


JOHN  KEATS  Tl 

Its  gathering  waves — ye  felt  it  not.    The  blue 
Bared  its  eternal  bosom,  and  the  dew 
Of  summer  nights  collected  still  to  make 
The  morning  precious:  beauty  was  awake! 
Why  were  ye  not  awake?    But  ye  were  dead 
To  things  ye  knew  not  of, — were  closely  wed 
To  musty  laws  lined  out  with  wretched  rule 
And  compass  vile:  so  that  ye  taught  a  school 
Of  dolts  to  smoothe,  inlay,  and  clip,  and  fit. 
Till,  like  the  certain  wands  of  Jacob's  wit. 
Their  verses  tallied.    Easy  was  the  task: 
A  thousand  handicraftsmen  wore  the  mask 
Of  Poesy.     Ill-fated,  impious  race! 
That  blasphemed  the  bright  Lyrist  to  his  face. 
And  did  not  know  it, — no,  they  went  about. 
Holding  a  poor,  decrepid  standard  out 
Marked  with  most  flimsy  mottos,  and  in  large 
The  name  of  one  Boileau!" 

This  passage,  says  Mr.  Sidney  Colvin,  "is  likely  to 
remain  for  posterity  the  central  expression  of  the 
spirit  of  literary  emancipation  then  militant  and 
about  to  triumph  in  England."  It  deserves  to 
be  carefully  studied,  and  especially  to  be  com- 
pared with  the  famous  prefaces  of  Wordsworth,  and 
the  fragmentary  disquisitions  of  Coleridge  upon 
the  same  subject. 

Quoting  again  from  Mr.  Colvin,  it  may  be  said 
that  "one  of  the  great  symptoms  of  returning  vitality 
in  the  imagination  of  Europe  toward  the  close  of  the 
last  century,  was  its  awakening  to  the  forgotten 
charm  of  past  modes  of  faith  and  life.  When  men, 
in  the  earlier  part  of  that  century,  spoke  of  Greek 
antiquity,  it  was  in  stale  and  borrowed  terms,  which 


28  JOHN  KEATS 

showed  that  they  had  never  felt  its  power;  just  as, 
when  they  spoke  of  nature,  it  was  in  set  phrases  that 
showed  that  they  had  never  looked  at  her."  Keats 
was  not  the  only  poet  of  his  time  to  hark  back  to 
classical  antiquity  for  his  inspiration,  nor  was  he 
the  only  poet  to  look  upon  nature  with  his  own  eyes, 
and  to  reproduce  the  vision  as  it  appeared  to  him 
in  terms  clarified  of  the  conceits  and  affectations  which 
an  artificial  age  had  held  in  fashion.  But  there  is  a 
difference  between  the  envisagement  of  nature  which 
we  find  in  the  poetry  of  Keats  and  that  which  we  find 
in  the  poetry  of  Shelley  and  Wordsworth.  To  quote 
once  more  from  Mr.  Colvin : 

"The  instinct  of  Wordsworth  was  to  interpret  all  the  opera- 
tions of  nature  by  those  of  his  own  strenuous  soul,  and  the 
imaginative  impressions  he  had  received  in  youth  from  the 
scenery  of  his  home,  deepened  and  enriched  by  continual  after- 
meditation,  and  mingling  with  all  the  currents  of  his  adult 
thought  and  feeling,  constituted  for  him  throughout  all  his  life 
the  most  vital  part  alike  of  patriotism,  of  philosophy,  and  of 
religion.  For  Shelley,  on  his  part,  natural  beauty  was  in  a 
twofold  sense  sjTubolical.  In  the  visible  glories  of  the  world 
his  philosophy  saw  the  veil  of  the  unseen,  while  his  philanthropy 
\       found  in  them  types  and  auguries  of  a  better  life  on  iearth." 

I     Keats,  on  the  other  hand,  loved  nature  for  her  own 

\    sake,   and   gave   slight   thought   to  the  infusion   of 

\   spiritual  meaning  into  what  he  saw.     His  was  the 

more  absolute  vision,  which  is  neither  obscured  nor 

heightened,  as  the  case  may  be,  by  an  adventitious 

symbolism  or  an  obtrusive  morality. 

That  sense  of  the  charm  of  outworn  modes  of  life 


JOHN  KEATS  29 

and  faith,  which  Keats  did  so  much  to  bring  back 
into  EngHsh  poetry,  is  illustrated,  on  the  classical 
side,  by  his  "Endymion,"  the  colossal  fragment  of 
his  "Hyperion,"  which  may  be  called  a  sort  of  Greek 
Gotterdammerung,  the  famous  sonnet  on  the  Elgin 
marbles,  and  the  even  more  famous  and  beautiful 
"Ode  on  a  Grecian  Urn."  These  were  his  contribu- 
tions to  what  we  may  call  the  modern  Renaissance, 
the  movement  to  which  Goethe  and  Winckelmann  had 
given  so  marked  an  impetus  in  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury, and  which  has  been  felt  throughout  our  own. 
In  this  respect  Keats  connects  directly  with  the  poet 
of  "Atalanta  in  Calydon"  and  "Erechtheus."  In  his 
sympathy  with  the  spirit  of  medisevalism,  as  illus- 
trated by  "Isabella"  and  "The  Eve  of  Saint  Agnes," 
he  connects  equally  with  Rossetti  and  Morris.  In 
English  poetry,  his  chief  sources  of  inspiration  were 
Chaucer  and  Spenser,  Milton  and  the  great  Eliza- 
bethans. It  must  be  added  also  that  his  genius  was 
characterised  by  a  distinct  Oriental  strain,  a  sort 
of  natural  magic  which  the  fashion  of  our  own  day  is 
apt  to  describe  as  Celtic,  although  by  no  means 
thereby  accounting  for  it.  In  a  recent  selection  from 
the  "Arabian  Nights,"  prepared  for  school  use  by 
Mr.  Adam  Singleton,  this  striking  statement  is  made: 
"In  the  whole  of  English  literature  there  are  only 
a  couple  of  lines  that  even  suggest  the  kind  of  en- 
chanted dreaming  of  which  the  Nights  are  full." 
These  lines  are,  it  is  hardly  necessary  to  say,  those 
which  describe  the 


30  JOHN  KEATS 

"Magic  casements,  opening  on  the  foam 
Of  perilous  seas,  in  faery  lands  forlorn." 

The  statement  is  hardly  exaggerated,  and  illustrates 
a  phase  of  the  poet's  genius  that  must  be  reckoned 
with  in  any  estimate  of  his  work. 

These  are  the  essential  things  for  which  the  poetry 
of  Keats  stands  in  our  literature.  The  volume  of  his 
work  is  small,  and  a  considerable  part  even  of  what 
we  have  might  be  spared  without  serious  loss,  being 
chiefly  valuable  for  its  showing  of  the  astonishing  de- 
velopment of  his  powers  during  the  few  years  of  his 
activity.  That  the  author  of  a  poem  so  glaringly 
faulty  as  the  "Endymion,"  should,  so  soon  thereafter, 
have  become  capable  of  giving  us  the  weirdness  of 
"Lamia,"  the  tender  pathos  of  "Isabella,"  the  pure 
romance  of  "The  Eve  of  Saint  Agnes"  and  "La 
BeDeDame  sans  Merci,"  is  one  of  the  most  marvellous 
facts  in  the  history  of  poetic  art.  And  it  is  an  even 
more  marvellous  fact  that  the  tentative  earher  poems 
should  have  been  the  precursors  of  "Hyperion"  and 
the  "Odes."  The  "Odes,"  indeed,  constitute  one  of 
the  supreme  achievements  of  English  poetry.  Their 
finished  and  flawless  beauty  is  unequalled  elsewhere 
in  Keats,  is  hardly  surpassed  anywhere  in  our  Ut- 
erature.  The  critic  of  rule  and  line  may  occasionally 
find  fault  with  them,  and  the  gaiety  of  the  nation 
was  considerably  enhanced  a  few  years  ago  by  the 
laboured  attempt  of  a  worthy  professor  of  Hterature 
to  prove  the  "Odes"  undeserving  of  their  reputation. 
Such  an  attempt  serves  only  to  bring  out  more  clearly 


JOHN  KEATS  31 

than  ever  their  immortal  beauty.  They  have  what 
Mr.  Forman  calls  "the  tremulous  thickness  of  utter- 
ance arising  from  intense  emotion."  This  quality  will 
not  bear  strict  logical  analysis,  for  it  appeals  to  the 
heart  more  than  it  does  to  the  intellect.  The  "Odes," 
the  four  or  five  longer  poems  that  at  once  occur  to  the 
mind  of  every  reader,  together  with  a  few  of  the 
sonnets,  are  the  credentials  which  Keats  brings  to  the 
critical  Areopagus.  They  are  supplemented  by  a 
few  such  phrases  of  royal  mintage  as: 

"A  thing  of  beauty  is  a  joy  forever." 

"The  poetry  of  earth  is  never  dead." 

"Beauty  is  truth,  truth  beauty, — that  is  all 
Ye  know  on  earth,  and  all  ye  need  to  know." 

"That  large  utterance  of  the  early  gods." 

"Those  green-robed  senators  of  mighty  woods. 
Tall  oaks,  branch-charmed  by  the  earnest  stars. 
Dream,  and  so  dream  all  night  without  a  stir." 

"The  moving  waters  at  their  priestlike  task 
Of  pure  ablution  round  earth's  human  shores." 

The  fame  of  the  poet  is  secure  who  can  bring  us  such 
gifts  as  these.     He  has  achieved 

"The   great   end 
Of  poesy,  that  it  should  be  a  friend 
To  soothe  the  cares,  and  lift  the  thoughts  of  man." 

His  fame  has  been  comparatively  free  from  those 
vicissitudes  which  have  attended  the  fame  of  his  con- 


32  JOHN  KEATS 

temporaries.  The  voice  of  detraction  died  away 
soon  after  his  death,  and  there  have  been  few  jarring 
notes  in  the  criticism  of  his  finished  work.  While 
Wordsworth,  and  Byron,  and  Shelley  have  divided 
the  critics  into  hostile  camps,  Keats  has  united  them 
in  an  almost  unbroken  chorus  of  praise.  His  influence 
upon  the  poets  who  have  succeeded  him  has  been 
very  great.  We  find  it  particularly  marked  in  the 
cases  of  Tennyson,  Rossetti,  and  Arnold.  In  re- 
viewing the  poetry  of  the  century,  says  Miss  Guiney, 
"one  feels  the  breath  and  touch  of  Keats  like  an  in- 
cantation." And  the  poets  yet  to  come  will,  like 
those  who  have  passed  from  us,  experience  the  con- 
tagion of  that  breath  and  that  spirit,  and  will  still 
direct  their  gaze  to  those  skies  where 

"Burning  through  the  inmost  veil  of  Heaven, 
The  soul  of  Adonais,  like  a  star, 
Beacons  from  the  abode  where  the  Eternal  are." 


In  the  voluminous  literature  which  has  the  life 
and  work  of  Shelley  for  its  subject,  there  is  no 
phrase  more  familiar  or  more  frequently  quoted  than 
Matthew  Arnold's  variation  of  the  remark  made  by 
Joubert  about  Plato.  The  French  "thought"  runs: 
"Plato  loses  himself  in  the  void,  but  one  sees  the  play 
of  his  wings,  one  hears  them  rustle."  Arnold,  mak- 
ing use  of  this  image,  describes  Shelley  as  "a  beauti- 
ful and  ineffectual  angel,  beating  in  the  void  his 
luminous  wings  in  vain."  The  poetical  form  of  this 
characterisation  serves  to  impress  it  upon  the  mem- 
ory, but  it  must  be  reckoned,  as  to  its  content,  one 
of  the  least  felicitous  things  that  Arnold  ever  said. 
It  embodies  too  much  of  the  patronising  and  even 
contemptuous  spirit  displayed  by  many  well-inten- 
tioned writers  when  dealing  with  the  work  of  Shelley. 
It  is  one  of  many  illustrations  of  what  Professor 
Woodberry  calls  the  "poor,  poor  Shelley"  theory 
of  the  poet's  life.  Recurring,  however,  to  the  original 
of  Arnold's  dictum,  we  are  reminded  that  erring  with 
Plato  is  at  least  a  creditable  form  of  intellectual  in- 
firmity, and  those  of  us  who  have  long  held  Shelley's 
memory  enshrined  in  our  heart  of  hearts  may  perhaps 
be  content  with  the  implied  admission  that  his  in- 
effectuality  was  of  the  same  kind  as  that  of  Plato. 

33 


34  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

If  it  be  the  mark  of  ineffectual  effort  to  arouse  the 
most  generous  ardors  of  the  spirit  in  behalf  of  an 
exalted  ideal  of  social  reorganisation,  to  inspire  many 
of  the  best  intellects  of  three  successive  generations 
with  a  renewed  faith  in  mankind,  to  kindle  in  hun- 
dreds of  thousands  of  souls  a  flaming  passion  for 
justice,  for  liberty,  and  for  the  brotherhood  of  man 
— if  to  accomplish  these  things  be  "vain,"  then,  and 
then  only,  may  we  accept  Arnold's  bit  of  rhetoric  as 
a  plain  statement  of  the  truth.  The  notion  that 
Shelley  was  a  mere  visionary,  a  being  as  fragile  in 
intellect  as  in  frame,  a  nature  of  almost  feminine 
weakness  as  well  as  feminine  sensitiveness,  has  long 
had  currency,  although  its  refutation  may  be  found 
easily  enough  in  any  of  his  biographies.  If  space 
permitted,  it  would  be  well  to  introduce  at  this  point 
two  or  three  of  his  very  practical  letters  to  Godwin. 
They  would  afford  a  most  effective  antidote  to  the 
belief  that  poets  in  general,  and  Shelley  more  than 
most  other  poets,  can  have  no  firm  grasp  upon  the 
reaHties  of  every-day  existence.  I  have  never  been 
able  to  understand  what  people  mean  when  they  com- 
plain of  a  poet  like  Shelley  that  his  message  is  too 
vague  and  ethereal  to  have  any  perceptible  influence 
upon  human  conduct.  Would  they  have  a  poet  abdi- 
cate his  genius  and  descend  to  the  homely  level  of 
Poor  Richard  and  his  maxims.^  Nor  do  I  understand 
what  they  mean  when  they  belittle  such  a  poet  by 
asserting  that  he  has  made  no  additions  to  human 
thought.      Even    Professor   Dowden,   who   certainly 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  35 

cannot  be  charged  with  a  failure  to  write  sympa- 
thetically of  Shelley,  says  that  "he  did  not  contribute 
a  single  original  idea  of  importance"  to  our  nine- 
teenth-century stock.  What  other  poet,  we  may  ask, 
has  made  such  a  contribution?  If  this  be  a  reason 
for  slighting  Shelley,  how  much  more  are  we  bound 
to  speak  disapprovingly  of  Keats,  who  of  set  purpose 
refrained  from  putting  philosophy  into  his  verse ;  or 
of  Byron,  whose  philosophy  was  as  destructive  and 
negative  as  that  of  Shelley  was  positive  and  con- 
structive. We  have  no  right  to  expect  of  a  poet  that 
he  shall  do  things  like  the  Kantian  "Transcendental 
Esthetic,"  or  the  Darwinian  "Origin  of  Species."  A 
reasoned  philosophy,  such  as  that  for  the  lack  of 
which  Arnold  was  reproached  by  Mr.  Frederic  Har- 
rison, is  the  last  thing  that  a  poet  should  seek  to  give 
us.  His  function  is  rather  to  seize  intuitively  upon 
isolated  and  ultimate  truths,  or  to  interpret  such 
results  as  have  been  achieved  by  the  laborious 
processes  of  philosophy  in  that  heightened  language 
of  which  the  poet  alone  is  master,  and  in  which  ordi- 
nary words  become  raised  to  algebraic  powers. 
Truth  is  many-sided,  and  its  whole  body  is  not  to  be 
sought  in  poetry ;  rather  do  its  separate  facets  flash 
out  here  and  there  in  the  light  which  they  reflect  from 
the  genius  which  shines  upon  them.  When  the 
thinker  has  done  his  work,  the  poet  finds  his  opportu- 
nity ;  Coleridge  found  it  in  the  transcendental  philos- 
ophy, Tennyson  found  it  in  the  doctrine  of  evolution. 
The  opportunity  of  Shelley  was  found  in  the  doc- 


36  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

trines  of  the  philosophers  who  prepared  the  way  for 
the  French  Revolution.  From  the  time  when  Burke 
leaped  into  the  arena  with  his  tremendous  denuncia- 
tions of  the  Revolution,  and  Fox  greeted  the  fall  of 
the  Bastile  as  much  the  greatest  event  that  had  ever 
happened  in  the  history  of  mankind,  the  French 
Revolution  became  a  part  of  English  literature  in 
the  sense  that  it  almost  superseded  domestic  topics 
as  a  subject  of  controversial  discussion,  and  gave 
a  new  impulse  to  the  group  of  writers  who  were  des- 
tined to  occupy  the  foreground  of  English  poetry 
during  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
Keats  alone  pursued  his  art,  as  we  have  seen,  with 
what  tranquillity  he  might,  during  the  few  years 
allotted  him,  unaffected  by  the  upheaval  of  the 
social  order  which  had  taken  place  in  Europe.  But 
he  was  practically  alone  in  this  attitude  of  artistic 
detachment.  How  Byron  and  Coleridge,  Wordsworth 
and  Landor,  were  influenced  by  the  Revolution  it  will 
be  the  task  of  subsequent  chapters  to  state.  It  is 
with  the  case  of  Shelley  that  we  are  now  concerned, 
and  he  was  the  child  of  the  Revolution  in  its  nobler 
spiritual  aspects  as  distinctively  as  Byron  was  its 
child  in  its  more  violent  aspects  and  their  extensions 
beyond  the  domain  of  politics  into  those  of  literature 
and  society.  We  may  distinguish  three  phases  in 
English  opinion  concerning  the  Revolution.  There 
was  first  the  phase  of  general  sympathy,  which  was 
typified  by  the  outburst  ^f  Fox  and  the  early  enthu- 
siasm of  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth.  \  English  politi- 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  37 

cal  philosophy  and  practice  had  done  much,  through 
the  influence  of  Rousseau  and  Voltaire,  to  bring 
about  the  upheaval  of  1789,  and  many  Englishmen 
recognised  the  stirring  events  of  the  years  that  fol- 
lowed as  affording  a  practical  application  of  princi- 
ples with  which  they  had  long  been  familiar,  and 
which  they  had  long  cherished.  The  second  phase  of 
opinion  was  that  of  indignant  protest  against  the 
unbridled  passions  set  free  by  the  Revolution,  of 
revolt  against  its  excesses,  and  of  despair  at  the 
triumph  of  the  military  despotism  into  which  it  be- 
came merged.  Burke  was  the  first  and  the  most 
fiery  exponent  of  this  phase  of  opinion,  and  many  who 
had  at  first  dissented  from  his  views  were  led  by 
subsequent  developments  to  add  their  influence  to  the 
conservative  reaction.  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  and 
Southey  were  conspicuous  among  those  who  suff^ered 
disillusionment,  and  abandoned  the  hopes  with  which 
they  had  at  first  acclaimed  the  Revolution.  The  third 
phase  of  opinion  was  that  of  the  men  whose  con- 
victions of  the  ultimate  vahdity  of  the  principles 
upon  which  the  Revolution  was  based  were  too  firm 
to  be  overthrown,  who  were  sobered  yet  undaunted 
by  its  outcome,  and  who  held  fast  to  the  faith  which 
had  been  rooted  in  them  from  the  time  of  its  earliest 
manifestations.     They  were  the  ones  who 

"Never -doubted  cloyds  would  break. 
Never  dreamed,  though"  right  were  worsted,  wrong 

would  triumph. 
Held  we  fall  to  ri^e,'  are  baffled  to  fight  better. 
Sleep  to  wake." 


jm  tf^- ^j>^»4  irr»  tr^ 


38  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

Among  them  Landor  was  particularly  noteworthy, 
and  his  invincible  optimism  became  the  legacy  of  his 
friend  Robert  Browning,  who  kept  it  alive  in  Eng- 
lish poetry  down  to  our  own  time.  These  three 
phases  of  opinion  were  not  strictly  consecutive,  they 
were  rather  concurrent  in  men  of  different  tempera- 
ments and  different  degrees  of  hopefulness.  Shelley, 
although  born  too  late  to  feel  the  impact  of  the  first 
waves  of  the  revolutionary  movement,  represents  the 
third  phase  of  opinion,  and  must  be  counted  among 
those  whose  unwavering  faith  could  not  conceive  it 
possible  that  the  right  should  not  eventually  triumph 
in  a  reorganised  and  regenerated  society.  He  was 
in  close  spiritual  kinship  with  Condorcet,  who,  as  Mr. 
John  Morley  says,  "while  each  moment  expecting  the 
knock  of  the  executioner  at  his  door,  found  as  reli- 
gious a  solace  as  any  early  martyr  had  ever  found  in 
his  barbarous  mysteries,  when  he  linked  his  own  efforts 
for  reason  and  freedom  with  the  eternal  chain  of  the 
destinies  of  man."  "This  contemplation,"  Condorcet 
wrote,  at  a  time  "when  every  hope  that  he  had  ever 
cherished  seemed  to  one  without  the  eye  of  faith 
to  be  extinguished  in  bloodshed,  disorder,  and  bar- 
barism"— 


"This  contemplation  is  for  him  a  refuge  into  which  the  rancour 
of  his  persecutors  can  never  follow  him;  in  which,  living  in 
thought  with  man  reinstated  in  the  rights  and  the  dignity  of  his 
nature,  he  forgets  man  tormented  and  corrupted  by  greed, 
by  base  fear,  by  envy;  it  is  here  that  he  truly  abides  with  his 
fellows,  in  an  elysium  that  his  reason  knows  how  to  create  for 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  39 

itself,  and  that  his  love  for  humanity  adorns  with  all  purest 
delights." 

These  words  might  easily  pass  for  Shelley's,  so  ex- 

actl}^   do   they   express   the   spirit   and   the   temper 

of  his  life  work.     A  frequently  quoted  passage  from 

Wordsworth  occupies  a  central  position  in  the  poetry 

of  this  period  as  a  description  of  the  feelings  with 

which  the  Revolution  was  hailed  by  those  who  look 

forward  to  a  realisation  of  the  golden  years  of  the 

fabled  past. 

"Bliss  was  it  in  that  dawn  to  be  alive. 
But  to  be  young  was  very  heaven !    O  times 
In  which  the  meagre,  stale,  forbidding  ways 
Of  custom,  law,  and  statute,  took  at  once 
The  attraction  of  a  country  in  romance! 
Not  favoured  spots  alone,  but  the  whole  earth 
The  beauty  wore  of  promise." 

Professor  Woodberry  says : 

"When  Shelley  began  to  think  and  feel,  and  became  a  living 
soul,  the  first  flush  of  dawn  had  gone  by;  but  the  same  hope- 
fulness sprang  up  in  hira,  it  was  invincible,  and  it  made  him 
the  poet  of  the  Revolution,  of  which  he  was  the  child.  So  far 
as  the  Revolution  was  speculative  or  moral,  he  reflected  it  com- 
pletely. Its  commonplaces  were  burning  truths  in  his  heart; 
its  ferment  was  his  own  intellectual  life;  its  confusions,  its 
simplicities,  its  misapprehensions  of  the  laws  of  social  change, 
were  a  part  of  himself.  It  would  be  wrong  to  ascribe  the 
crudities  of  Shelley's  thought  merely  to  his  immature  and  boy- 
ish development:  they  belonged  quite  as  much  to  the  youth  of 
the  cause:  he  received  what  he  was  taught  in  the  form  in  which 
his  masters  held  it." 

The  most  complete  exposition  of  Shelley's  social 
and  religious  philosophy  is  to  be  found  in  the  three 


40  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

longer  poems :  "Queen  Mab,"  "The  Revolt  of  Islam," 
and  "Prometheus  Unbound."  They  were  published 
at  the  respective  ages  of  twenty-one,  twenty-five,  and 
twenty-eight.  The  seven  years  that  fall  between  the 
first  and  the  last  of  these  dates  were  years  of  swiftly 
ripening  thought  and  broadening  ideals.  The  youth- 
ful poem  of  "Queen  Mab,"  although  it  cannot  be 
ignored  in  any  study  of  the  poet's  intellectual  devel- 
opment, has  had  far  too  large  a  share  in  forming 
the  popular  estimate  of  Shelley's  teachings.  It  is  full 
of  crudities,  both  of  thought  and  expression,  and 
precisely  because  of  these  crudities  it  made  a  strong 
appeal  to  radicals  of  the  narrow  and  uncultivated 
t3rpe.  Its  rather  cheap  declamation  against  the 
"kings,  priests,  and  statesmen"  who  "blast  the  human 
flower  Even  in  its  tender  bud" ;  its  audacious  adoption 
o/  the  Voltairian  watchword,  ecrasez  Vinfame;  its 
blatant  avowal  of  an  atheism  which  the  poet  took  no 
care  to  explain  as  being  nothing  more  than  a  pro- 
test against  the  forms  and  the  vices  of  an  official 
religion — these  were  the  qualities  by  virtue  of  which 
"Queen  Mab"  appealed  to  a  certain  class  of  raw  and 
intolerant  thinkers,  who  at  once  seized  upon  the  poem 
as  an  effective  tract  for  the  uses  of  their  propaganda. 
Shelley  himself  soon  became  ashamed  of  "Queen 
Mab,"  and  sought  to  suppress  it,  but  the  circulation 
had  gone  be3^ond  his  control.  The  poem  is  not,  how- 
ever, without  its  passages  of  unusual  beauty,  and  the 
young  reader,  who  takes  small  heed  of  the  niceties  of 
thought  or  of  poetic  art,  may  well  find  in  it  a  favour- 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  41 

able  introduction  to  Shelley,  or  even,  as  the  present 
writer  has  a  vivid  personal  recollection  of  having 
found,  an  introduction  to  the  whole  realm  of  poetry, 
hitherto  unappreciated  and  unexplored.  There  is 
something  peculiarly  forcible  about  the  manner  in 
which  the  poem  depicts  the  wretchedness  of  man's 
estate  under  the  withering  influences  of  selfishness 
and  superstition,  while  its  eloquent  exposition  of  the 
doctrine  of  human  perfectibility,  which  Shelley  got 
directly  from  Godwin  and  indirectly  from  the  French 
philosophers  of  the  eighteenth  century,  is  still  capa- 
ble of  stirring  the  soul  to  a  fine  enthusiasm.  Shel- 
ley's vision  of  the  future  and  all  the  wonder  that  shall 
be,  is  expressed  in  this  poem  with  the  glow  of  emo- 
tion, at  least,  if  not  with  the  perfection  of  art,  which 
we  find  in  the  choruses  of  ''Prometheus  Unbound"  and 
"Hellas." 

"O  happy  Earth!  reality  of  heaven! 
To  which  those  restless  souls  that  ceaselessly 
Throng  through  the  human  universe,  aspire; 
Thou  consummation  of  all  mortal  hope! 
Thou  glorious  prize  of  blindly-working  will! 
Whose  rays,  diffused  throughout  all  space  and  time. 
Verge  to  one  point  and  blend  forever  there: 
Of  purest  spirits  thou  pure  dwelling  place! 
Where  care  and  sorrow,  impotence  and  crime. 
Languor,  disease,  and  ignorance  dare  not  come: 
O  happy  Earth,  reality  of  heaven! 

"Genius  has  seen  thee  in  her  passionate  dreams. 
And  dim  forebodings  of  thy  loveliness 
Haunting  the  human  heart,  have  there  entwined 
Those  rooted  hopes  of  some  sweet  place  of  bliss 


42  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

Where  friends  and  lovers  meet  to  part  no  more. 
Thou  art  the  end  of  all  desire  and  will, 
The  product  of  all  action;  and  the  souls 
That  by  the  paths  of  an  aspiring  change 
Have  reached  thy  haven  of  perpetual  peace. 
There  rest  from  the  eternity  of  toil 
That  framed  the  fabric  of  thy  perfectness." 

In  the  renovated  earth  of  that  vision, 

"Mild  was  the  slow  necessity  of  death: 
The  tranquil  spirit  failed  beneath  its  grasp. 
Without  a  groan,  almost  without  a  fear. 
Calm  as  a  voyager  to  some  distant  land. 
And  full  of  wonder,  full  of  hope  as  he." 

And  the  final  invocation  to  the  spirit  before  whose 
gaze  all  this  panorama  of  past,  present,  and  future 
has  been  unrolled,  may  still  have  for  us  the  inspi- 
ration, if  only  the  faith  be  given  us,  that  it  had  for 
Shelley  and  his  readers  of  nearly  a  hundred  years 
ago. 

"Yet,  human  Spirit,  bravely  hold  thy  course, 
Let  virtue  teach  thee  firmly  to  pursue 
The  gradual  paths  of  an  aspiring  change: 
For  birth  and  life  and  death,  and  that  strange  state 
Before  the  naked  soul  has  found  its  home. 
All  tend  to  perfect  happiness,  and  urge 
The  restless  wheels  of  being  on  their  way. 
Whose  flashing  spokes,  instinct  with  infinite  life. 
Bicker  and  burn  to  gain  their  destined  goal. 

"Fear  not  then.  Spirit,  death's  disrobing  hand, 
So  welcome  when  the  tyrant  is  awake, 
So  welcome  when  the  bigot's  hell-torch  burns; 
'Tis  but  the  voyage  of  a  darksome  hour. 
The  transient  gulph-dream  of  a  startling  sleep. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  43 

Death  is  no  foe  to  virtue:  earth  has  seen 
Love's  brightest  roses  on  the  scaffold  bloom, 
Mingling  with  freedom's  fadeless  laurels  there, 
And  presaging  the  truth  of  visioned  bliss." 

"The  Revolt  of  Islam,"  which  was  at  first  entitled 
"Laon  and  Cythna,"  exhibits  a  great  advance  over 
"Queen  Mab"  in  poetic  art,  although  we  are  still 
far  from  the  sunlit  uplands  of  "Prometheus  Un- 
bound." Shelley  was  careful  to  say  that  he  intended 
it  for  a  narrative,  and  not  a  didactic  poem,  but  he 
could  not  prevent  it  from  becoming  the  vehicle  of  his 
hopes  and  aspirations  for  the  welfare  of  mankind. 
In  place  of  the  aggressive  motto  of  "Queen  Mab," 
we  are  given  those  noble  lines  of  Chapman,  which 
depict  the  attitude  of  the  self-poised  soul,  proudly 
conscious  of  its  own  powers,  and  determined  to  live 
by  its  own  light. 

"There  is  no  danger  to  a  man,  that  knows 
What- life  and  death  is:  there's  not  any  law 
Exceeds  his  knowledge;  neither  is  it  lawful 
That  he  should  stoop  to  any  other  law." 

In  the  preface  to  this  poem,  Shelley  gives  us  the 
fullest  statement  to  be  found  anywhere  in  his  work 
concerning  his  attitude  toward  the  French  Revolu- 
tion.    He  says: 

"The  panic  which,  like  an  epidemic  transport,  seized  upon  all 
classes  of  men  during  the  excesses  consequent  upon  the  French 
Revolution,  is  gradually  giving  place  to  sanity.  It  has  ceased 
to  be  believed,  that  whole  generations  of  mankind  ought  to 
consign  themselves  to  a  hopeless  inheritance  of  ignorance  and 
misery,  because  a  nation  of  men  who  had  been  dupes  and  slaves 
for  centuries,  were  incapable  of  conducting  themselves  with  the 


44  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

wisdom  and  tranquillity  of  freemen  so  soon  as  some  of  their 
fetters  were  partially  loosened.  That  their  conduct  could  not 
have  been  marked  by  any  other  characters  than  ferocity  and 
thoughtlessness,  is  the  historical  fact  from  which  liberty  derives 
all  its  recommendations,  and  falsehood  the  worst  features  of  its 
deformity.  There  is  a  reflux  in  the  tide  of  human  things  which 
bears  the  shipwrecked  hopes  of  men  into  a  secure  haven,  after 
the  storms  are  passed.  .  .  .  The  French  Revolution  may  be  con- 
sidered as  one  of  those  manifestations  of  a  general  state  of 
feeling  among  ci^11ised  mankind,  produced  by  a  defect  of  cor- 
respondence between  the  knowledge  existing  in  society  and  the 
improvement,  or  gradual  abolition  of  political  institutions.  .  .  . 
The  re\Tilsion  occasioned  by  tlie  atrocities  of  the  demagogues 
and  the  reestablishment  of  successive  tyrannies  in  France  was 
terrible,  and  felt  in  the  remotest  corner  of  the  civilised 
world.  .  .  .  Thus  many  of  the  most  ardent  and  tender-hearted 
of  the  worshippers  of  public  good,  have  been  morally  ruined 
by  what  a  partial  glimpse  of  the  events  they  deplored,  ap- 
peared to  show  as  the  melancholy  desolation  of  all  their 
cherished  hopes.  Hence  gloom  and  misanthropy  have  become 
the  characteristics  of  the  age  in  wliich  we  live,  the  solace  of  a 
disappointment  that  unconsciously  finds  relief  only  in  the  wilful 
exaggeration  of  its  own  despair.  This  influence  has  tainted  the 
literature  of  the  age  with  the  hopelessness  of  the  minds  from 
which  it  flows.  .  .  .  Our  works  of  Action  and  poetry  have  been 
overshadowed  by  the  same  infectious  gloom.  But  mankind 
appears  to  me  to  be  emerging  from  their  trance.  I  am  aware, 
methinks,  of  a  slow,  gradual,  silent  change.  In  that  belief  I 
have  composed  the  following  Poem." 

What  may  be  taken  as  a  t3rpical  passage  in  ''The 
Revolt  of  Islam,"  typical,  that  is,  in  its  expression  of 
the  poet's  optimism,  occurs  in  the  ninth  of  the  twelve 
cantos,  and  embraces  the  following  stanzas : 

"This  is  the  winter  of  the  world; — and  here 
We  die,  even  as  the  winds  of  Autunm  fad^ 
Expiring  in  the  f rore  and  foggy  air. — 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  45 

Behold !  Spring  comes,  tho'  we  must  pass,  who  made 
The  promise  of  its  birth, — even  as  the  shade 
Which  from  our  death,  as  from  a  mountain,  flings 
The  future,  a  broad  sunrise;  thus  arrayed 
As  with  the  plumes  of  overshadowing  wings. 
From  its  dark  gulph  of  chains.  Earth  like  an  eagle  springs. 


"O  dearest  love!  we  shall  be  dead  and  cold 
Before  this  morn  may  on  the  world  arise; 
Wouldst  thou  the  glory  of  its  dawn  behold? 
Alas!  gaze  not  on  me,  but  turn  thine  eyes 
On  thine  own  heart — it  is  a  Paradise 
Which  everlasting  spring  has  made  its  own. 
And  while  drear  winter  fills  the  naked  skies. 
Sweet  streams  of  sunny  thought,  and  flowers  fresh  blown 
Are  there,  and  weave  their  sounds  and  odours  into  one. 


"In  their  own  hearts  the  earnest  of  the  hope 
Which  made  them  great,  the  good  will  ever  find; 
And  tho'  some  envious  shade  may  interlope 
Between  the  effect  and  it, — One  comes  behind. 
Who  aye  the  future  to  the  past  will  bind — 
Necessity,  whose  sightless  strength  forever 
Evil  with  evil,  good  with  good  must  wind 
In  bands  of  union,  which  no  power  may  sever: 
They  must  bring  forth  their  kind,  and  be  divided  never  I 


"The  good  and  mighty  of  departed  ages 
Are  in  their  graves,  the  innocent  and  free. 
Heroes,  and  Poets,  and  prevailing  Sages, 
Who  leave  the  vesture  of  their  majesty 
To  adorn  and  clothe  this  naked  world; — and  we 
Are  like  to  them — such  perish,  but  they  leave 
All  hope,  or  love,  or  truth,  or  liberty. 
Whose  forms  their  mighty  spirits  could  conceive 
To  be  a  rule  and  law  to  ages  that  survive." 


46  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

This  poem,  this  "story  of  human  passion  in  its  most 
universal  character,"  as  Shelley  himself  called  it, 
this  "succession  of  pictures  illustrating  the  growth 
and  progress  of  individual  mind  aspiring  after  ex- 
cellence, and  devoted  to  the  love  of  mankind,"  is  less 
read  than  the  other  long  poems  of  Shelley;  but  its 
perusal  will  richly  reward  the  student,  and  its  inter- 
mediate position  between  "Queen  Mab"  and  "Prome- 
theus Unbound"  makes  its  examination  essential  to 
an  understanding  of  the  development  of  the  poet's 
idealism. 

Turning  now  to  "Prometheus  Unbound,"  we  stand 
at  the  entrance  to  the  highest  heaven  of  Shelley's 
imagination.  He  has  at  last  found  himself,  and  has 
subdued  his  passion  for  reform  to  the  requirements  of 
the  most  exacting  art.  The  didactical  and  polemical 
elements  of  those  earlier  poems  in  which  his  vision  of 
the  glorious  future  of  humanity  had  been  embodied, 
find  no  place  in  this  rapturous  lyrical  drama,  which 
bears  us  upon  its  strong  pinions  to  a  height  which 
only  the  greatest  of  poets — Dante,  and  Milton,  and 
Groethe — have  ever  reached.  "It  is  a  mistake,"  he 
says  in  the  preface  to  this  poem,  and  is  at  last  com- 
pletely justified  in  the  assertion, 

"it  is  a  mistake  to  suppose  that  I  dedicate  my  poetical  com- 
positions solely  to  the  direct  enforcement  of  reform,  or  that 
I  consider  them  in  any  degree  as  containing  a  reasoned  system 
on  the  theory  of  human  life.  Didactic  poetry  is  my  abhor- 
rence; nothing  can  be  equally  well  expressed  in  prose  that  is 
not  tedious  and  supererogatory  in  verse.  My  purpose  has 
hitherto  been  simply  to  familiarise  the  highly  refined  imagina- 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  47 

tion  of  the  more  select  classes  of  poetical  readers  with  beauti- 
ful idealisms  of  moral  excellence;  aware  that  until  the  mind 
can  love,  and  admire,  and  trust,  and  hope,  and  endure,  rea- 
soned principles  of  moral  conduct  are  seeds  cast  upon  the  high- 
way of  life  which  the  unconscious  passenger  tramples  into  dust, 
although  they  would  bear  the  harvest  of  his  happiness." 

What  the  harvest  of  that  happiness  might  be,  Prome- 
theus saw  when,  having  clothed  Jupiter  with  power 
and  dominion,  the  race  of  man  suffered 

"First  famine,  and  then  toil,  and  then  disease. 
Strife,  wounds,  and  ghastly  death  unseen  before, — " 


All  this 


'Prometheus  saw,  and  waked  the  legioned  hopes 
Which  sleep  within  folded  Elysian  flowers. 
Nepenthe,  Moly,  Amaranth,   fadeless  blooms. 
That  they  might  hide  with  thin  and  rainbow  wings 
The  shape  of  Death;  and  Love  he  sent  to  bind 
The  disunited  tendrils  of  that  vine 
Which  bears  the  wine  of  life,  the  human  heart; 
And  he  tamed  fire  which,  like  some  beast  of  prey. 
Most  terrible,  but  lovely,  played  beneath 
The  frown  of  man;  and  tortured  to  his  will 
Iron  and  gold,  the  slaves  and  signs  of  power. 
And  gems  and  poisons,  and  all  subtlest  forms 
Hidden  beneath  the  mountains  and  the  waves. 
He  gave  man  speech,  and  speech  created  thought. 
Which  is  the  measure  of  the  universe; 
And  Science  struck  the  thrones  of  earth  and  heaven, 
Which  shook,  but  fell  not;  and  the  harmonious  mind 
Poured  itself  forth  in  all-prophetic  song; 
And  music  lifted  up  the  listening  spirit 
Until  it  walked,  exempt  from  mortal  care. 
Godlike,  o'er  the  clear  billows  of  sweet  sound; 
And  human  hands  first  mimicked  and  then  mocked, 


48  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

With  moulded  limbs  more  lovely  than  its  own, 

The  human  form,  till  marble  grew  divine; 

And  mothers,  gazing,  drank  the  love  men  see 

Reflected  in  their  race,  behold,  and  perish. 

He  told  the  hidden  power  of  herbs  and  springs. 

And  Disease  drank  and  slept.     Death  grew  like  sleep. 

He  taught  the  implicated  orbits  woven 

Of  the  wide-wandering  stars;  and  how  the  sun 

Changes  his  lair,  and  by  what  secret  spell 

The  pale  moon  is  transformed,  when  her  broad  eye 

Gazes  not  on  the  interlunar  sea: 

He  taught  to  rule,  as  life  directs  the  limbs, 

The  tempest-winged  chariots  of  the  Ocean, 

And  the  Celt  knew  the  Indian.    Cities  then 

Were  built,  and  through  their  snow-like  columns  flowed 

The  warm  winds,  and  the  azure  aether  shone, 

And  the  blue  sea  and  shado^vy  hills  were  seen. 

Such,  the  alle\iations  of  his  state, 

Prometheus  gave  to  man." 

This  magnificent  passage,  it  will  be  remembered,  is 
placed  upon  the  lips  of  Asia,  and  occurs  in  her  col- 
loquy with  Demogorgon  in  the  second  act.  The 
allegory  of  the  poem  presents  great  difficulties,  and 
it  is  practically  certain  that  Shelley  had  not  thought 
it  out  with  logical  clearness  in  all  its  details.  Mr. 
W.  M.  Rossetti's  painstaking  analysis  has  worked 
out  as  reasonable  an  interpretation  as  is  likely  to 
be  found.  According  to  this  critic,  Prometheus  is 
the  mind  of  man,  which  has  created  in  Jupiter  the 
anthropomorphic  God  of  the  theologians.  This 
deity,  being  but  a  creation  of  the  mind,  "could  con- 
tinue to  exist  in  that  character  and  with  that  potency 
only  so  long  as  the  human  mind,  which  he  tormented, 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  49 

would  tolerate  his  existence."  Asia  symbolises  na- 
ture, and  Demogorgon's  own  words  declare  him  to  be 

"Eternity:  demand  no  direr  name." 

The  unbinding  of  Prometheus,  then,  becomes  inevita- 
ble, for  it  means  the  liberation  of  the  mind  of  man 
from  a  tyranny  of  its  own  creating,  the  loosening 
of  the  shackles  fixed  upon  it  by  its  own  act.  When 
the  day  of  emancipation  shall  come,  the  race  of  man 
will  realise  to  the  full  all  the  blessings  originally  in- 
tended by  Prometheus,  but  which  were  withheld  by 
the  very  act  whereby  Prometheus  gave  power  to 
Jupiter,  and  suffered  ages  of  torment  in  consequence 
thereof.  In  the  glorious  closing  act  of  the  drama  the 
hour  of  liberation  has  come,  and  the  spirits  of  earth 
and  air  and  sky  sing  the  happy  event  in  ecstatic 
strains  of  intricately  interwoven  melody.  The  solemn 
voice  of  Eternity  itself  hymns  the  hour  when  "Con- 
quest is  dragged  captive  through  the  deep,"  and  when 

"Love,  from  its  awful  throne  of  patient  power 
In  the  wise  heart,  from  the  last  giddy  hour 
Of  dead  endurance,  from  the  slippery,  steep, 
And  narrow  verge  of  crag-like  agony,  springs, 
And  folds  over  the  world  its  healing  wings." 

Then,  as  if  to  seal  the  poem,  as  Dante's  "Paradiso" 
is  sealed,  "with  sudden  music  of  pure  peace,"  we  close 
the  page  upon  these  words : 

"To  suffer  woes  which  Hope  thinks  infinite; 
To  forgive  wrongs  darker  than  death  or  night; 
To  defy  Power,  which  seems  omnipotent; 


50  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

To  love,  and  bear;  to  hope  till  Hope  creates 
From  its  own  wreck  the  thing  it  contemplates; 

Neither  to  change,  nor  faulter,  nor  repent; 
This,  like  thy  glory,  Titan,  is  to  be 
Good,  great  and  joyous,  beautiful  and  free; 
This  is  alone  Life,  Joy,  Empire,  and  Victory." 

The  analogy  of  music  is  fitting  here,  as  so  frequently 
it  becomes  when  we  try  to  speak  adequately  concern- 
ing the  liighest  reaches  of  poetry,  and  it  seems  to  me 
that  the  closing  act  of  "Prometheus  Unbound"  finds 
its  closest  parallel — almost  the  only  parallel  of  which 
it  is  worthy — in  the  choral  ending  of  the  Ninth  Sym- 
phony of  Beethoven.  The  joy  which  is  as  unmeas- 
ured as  the  light  of  the  liberal  sun,  and  the  love 
which  is  as  deep  as  the  very  heart  of  the  universe, 
have  found  in  these  two  works — the  symphony  and 
the  lyrical  drama — their  supremest  utterance,  their 
most  complete  and  comprehensive  expression.  Just 
as  music  reaches  its  greatest  imaginable  height  in 
the  Ninth  Symphony,  so  lyrical  poetry  achieves  its 
utmost  in  "Prometheus  L^nbound."  Lyrical  poetry 
has  many  qualities;  in  tenderness,  in  poignancy  of 
pathos,  in  mastery  of  the  elegiac  note,  other  poets 
have  equalled  Shelley ;  but  for  exuberant  splendour  of 
imaginative  diction,  for  the  flight  of  the  eagle  as  dis- 
tinguished from  the  flight  of  the  lark,  where  else 
in  all  poetry  shall  we  find  his  peer,  unless  we  go  back 
to  the  Theban  Eagle  and  the  crowning  glory  of 
Greek  song? 

It  seems  impossible  that  lyrical  drama  should  out- 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  51 

soar  the  "Prometheus  Unbound,"  but  when  we  read 
the  "Hellas,"  we  are  almost  tempted  to  believe  that 
the  impossible  has  been  achieved.  We  do  not  find  in 
this  poem  the  sustained  splendour  of  the  other;  but 
we  do  find,  at  least  in  its  choruses,  such  music  as  even 
Shelley  was  not  often  inspired  to  make.  When  the 
Greeks  began  their  War  of  Independence  in  1821, 
Shelley,  like  Byron,  threw  himself  heart  and  soul  into 
their  cause.  It  seemed  to  him  that  here  was  a  mani- 
fest sign  of  the  actual  breaking  of  that  new  dawn  for 
humanity  which  had  hitherto  been  but  previsioned  in 
his  poems. 

"In  the  great  morning  of  the  world, 

The  spirit  of  God  with  might  unfurled 

The  flag  of  Freedom  over  Chaos, 
And  all  its  banded  anarchs  fled, 

Like  vultures  frighted  from  Imaus, 
Before  an  earthquake's  tread. — 

So  from  Time's  tempestuous  dawn 

Freedom's  splendour  burst  and  shone: — 

Thermopylae  and  Marathon 

Caught,  like  mountains  beacon-lighted. 
The  springing  Fire. — The  wingM  glory 

On  Philippi  half-alighted, 
Like  an  eagle  on  a  promontory." 

And  at  last  once  more,  after  centuries  of  exile, 

"Freedom,  so 
To  what  of  Greece  remaineth  now 
Returns;  her  hoary  ruins  glow 
Like  Orient  mountains  lost  in  day; 

Beneath  the  safety  of  her  wings 
Her  renovated  nurslings  prey. 

And  in  the  naked  lightnings 
Of  truth  they  purge  their  dazzled  eyes." 


52  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

The  description  of  the  heroic  resistance  of  a  band 
of  Greek  patriots  to  the  Turkish  onslaught,  as  re- 
ported to  Mahmud  by  the  trembling  messenger,  is 
one  of  the  most  memorable  pages  in  all  the  work  of 
Shelley. 

"The  band,  intrenched  in  mounds  of  Turkish  dead. 
Grew  weak  and  few. — Then  said  the  Pacha,  'Slaves, 
Render  yourselves — they  have  abandoned  you — 
What  hope  of  refuge,  or  retreat,  or  aid? 
We  grant  your  lives.'    'Grant  that  which  is  thine  own!' 
Cried  one,  and  fell  upon  his  sword  and  died ! 
Another — 'God,  and  man,  and  hope  abandon  me; 
But  I  to  them,  and  to  myself,  remain 
Constant': — he  bowed  his  head,  and  his  heart  burst. 
A  third  exclaimed,  'There  is  a  refuge,  tyrant, 
Where  thou  darest  not  pursue,  and  canst  not  harm, 
Should'st  thou  pursue;  there  we  shall  meet  again.' 
Then  held  his  breath,  and,  after  a  brief  spasm. 
The  indignant  spirit  cast  its  mortal  garment 
Among  the  slain — dead  earth  upon  the  earth! 
So  these  survivors,  each  by  diflFerent  ways. 
Some  strange,  all  sudden,  none  dishonourable, 
Met  in  triumphant  death;  and  when  our  army 
Closed  in,  while  yet  wonder,  and  awe,  and  shame. 
Held  back  the  base  hyenas  of  the  battle 
That  feed  upon  the  dead  and  fly  the  living. 
One  rose  out  of  the  chaos  of  the  slain: 
And  if  it  were  a  corpse  which  some  dread  spirit 
Of  the  old  saviours  of  the  land  we  rule 
Had  lifted  in  its  anger  wandering  by; — 
Or  if  there  burned  within  the  dying  man 
Unquenchable  disdain  of  death,  and  faith 
Creating  what  it  feigned; — I  cannot  tell — 
But  he  cried,  'Phantoms  of  the  free,  we  come! 
Armies  of  the  Eternal,  ye  who  strike 
To  dust  the  citadels  of  sanguine  kings. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  53 

And  shake  the  souls  throned  on  their  stony  hearts, 

And  thaw  their  frostwork  diadems  like  dew; — 

O  ye  who  float  around  this  clime,  and  weave 

The  garment  of  the  glory  which  it  wears. 

Whose  fame,  though  earth  betray  the  dust  it  clasped, 

Lies  sepulchred  in  monumental  thought; — 

Progenitors  of  all  that  yet  is  great, 

Ascribe  to  your  bright  senate,  O  accept 

In  your  high  ministrations,  us,  your  sons — 

Us  first,  and  the  more  glorious  yet  to  come !' " 

Of  the  closing  chorus  of  this  drama,  at  least  the  first 
two  stanzas  must  be  given,  for  the  sake  of  their  ever- 
lasting beauty. 

"The  world's  great  age  begins  anew. 

The  golden  years  return. 
The  earth  doth  like  a  snake  renew 

Her  winter  weeds  outworn: 
Heaven  smiles,  and  faiths  and  empires  gleam. 
Like  wrecks  of  a  dissolving  dream. 

"A  brighter  Hellas  rears  its  mountains 

From  waves  serener  far ; 
A  new  Peneus  rolls  his  fountains 

Against  the  morning-star. 
Where  fairer  Tempes  bloom,  there  sleep 
Young  Cyclads  on  a  sunnier  deep." 

Lest  all  that  has  been  said  by  way  of  comment, 
and  quoted  by  way  of  illustration,  respecting  Shel- 
ley's lyrical  envisagement  of  the  golden  years  to  come, 
should  have  the  effect  of  fortifying  the  erroneous 
impression  that  he  was  a  visionary  and  nothing  more, 
it  seems  advisable  to  close  this  section  of  the  exposi- 
tion with  some  expert  testimony  concerning  his  hold 


54  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

upon  the  actual  facts  of  life  and  upon  the  processes 
of  the  practical  reason.  The  Rev.  Stopford  Brooke 
advises  us  to  make  a  careful  comparison  between 
Shelley's  views  on  political  and  social  topics  as  ex- 
pressed in  verse  and  his  views  on  the  same  topics  as 
found  in  his  prose  writings.  In  the  latter  case  he 
"expresses  himself  with  a  quietness  and  coolness, 
a  strictness  of  logic,  and  a  temperance  of  argument 
and  metaphor,  worthy  of  John  Stuart  Mill."  It  is 
only  in  his  poetry  that  "the  same  ideas  soar  into  the 
sky,  and  become  children  of  the  lightning  and  the 
sun."  Professor  Woodberry,  recalling  Shelley's 
many  practical  activities  in  connection  with  the  free- 
dom of  the  press,  the  condition  of  Ireland,  the  ques- 
tion of  Catholic  emancipation,  the  putting  of  reform 
to  vote,  the  Manchester  riots,  and  the  Revolutionary 
movement  upon  the  Continent,  declares  that  he  had  a 
strongly  practical  temperament,  that  "he  wished  to 
apply  ideas  as  well  as  to  express  them,  and  in  his 
own  life  he  was  always  restlessly  doing  what  he 
thought,  linking  the  word  with  an  act,  carrying  con- 
viction to  the  extreme  issue  of  duty  performed." 
And  Robert  Browning  says  "that  one  of  the  causes  of 
his  failure  at  the  outset  was  the  peculiar  practical- 
ness of  his  mind.  .  .  .  The  early  fervour  and  power 
to  see  was  accompanied  by  as  precocious  a  fertility  to 
contrive:  he  endeavoured  to  realise  as  he  went  on 
idealising;  every  wrong  had  simultaneously  its  rem- 
edy, and,  out  of  the  strength  of  his  hatred  for  the 
former,  he  took  the  strength  of  his  confidence  in  the 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  65 

latter."  Such  testimony  as  this  is  not  easily  to  be 
controverted,  and,  to  quote  again  from  Professor 
Woodberry,  I  feel  bound  to  insist  that  Shelley,  "had 
he  left  unwritten  those  personal  lyrics  which  some 
who  conceived  the  poet's  art  less  nobly  would  exalt 
above  his  grander  poems,  would  stand  preemi- 
nent and  almost  solitary  for  his  service  to  the  strug- 
gling world,  for  what  he  did  as  a  quickener  of  men's 
hearts  by  his  passion  for  supreme  and  simple  truths." 
We  have  seen  how  Keats  took  for  his  formula  the 
equation  of  truth  and  beauty;  with  Shelley  the 
formula  became  broadened,  and  his  essential  mes- 
sage is  that  beauty  is  goodness,  while  both  are  truth. 
In  a  word,  the  writings  of  Shelley  afford  the  most 
triumphant  illustration  in  our  literature  of  the 
principle  that  poetry  need  not  fear  to  ally  itself  with 
worthy  practical  issues,  that  it  is  entirely  possible 
for  poetry  to  become  the  agent  of  progress  without 
derogating  from  its  lofty  artistic  mission. 

Much  has  been  written,  much  more  than  need  have 
been,  or  than  has  proved  profitable,  upon  the  subject 
of  Shelley's  religious  and  philosophical  opinions. 
Concerning  the  latter,  the  influence  of  Plato  is  very 
evident,  and  the  influence  of  Berkeley  is  also  marked. 
Mrs.  Shelley  believed  that,  had  his  life  been  spared, 
"he  would  have  presented  the  world  with  a  complete 
theory  of  mind;  a  theory  to  which  Berkeley,  Cole- 
ridge, and  Kant  would  have  contributed;  but  more 
simple,  unimpugnable,  and  entire  than  the  systems 
of  these  writers."     However  this  may  be,  it  is  clear 


56  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

that  he  was  attracted  by  the  mystical  rather  than 
by  the  logical  aspect  of  the  philosophers  whom  he 
most  read,  and  we  may  see  in  his  "Epipsychidion" 
the  form  which  at  least  one  aspect  of  Platonism  as- 
sumed in  his  imagination.  As  for  his  religious  opin- 
ions, the  pamphlet  on  "The  Necessity  of  Atheism," 
written  at  the  age  of  eighteen,  was  a  piece  of  boyish 
bravado,  and  does  not  deserve  very  serious  consid- 
eration. Hardly  more  serious  was  the  inscription  in 
the  Swiss  album  which,  in  bad  Greek,  declared  the 
writer  to  be  "a  democrat,  a  philanthropist,  and  an 
atheist."  The  provocation  in  this  case  was  an  effu- 
sion of  what  Mr.  Swinburne  calls  the  "rancid  piety" 
of  some  tourist  whose  type  was  destined  afterwards 
to  become  immortalised  in  the  character  of  Monsieur 
Perrichon.  Under  the  circumstances,  considering  his 
youth,  Shelley  could  hardly  have  been  expected  to  do 
less  than  express  his  sentiments  in  this  startling 
fashion.  The  famous  notes  to  "Queen  Mab,"  al- 
though more  premeditated  than  the  defiant  acts  above 
mentioned,  are  really  nothing  more  than  the  vehement 
utterance  of  a  mind  which  discovers  that  it  has  been 
tricked  by  the  teachings  of  childhood,  and  finds  in- 
dignant vent  in  extreme  forms  of  expression.  "I  used 
the  word  atheism  to  express  my  abhorrence  of  super- 
stition," wrote  Shelley  in  later  years,  "I  took  it  up  as 
a  knight  takes  up  a  gauntlet  in  defiance  of  injustice." 
We  may  easily  enough  glean  from  Shelley's  maturer 
work  a  sheaf  of  passages  to  support  the  proposition 
that   he   was   in   full   sympathy   with   the   spirit   of 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  57 

Christianity,  and  opposed  only  to  the  false  trap- 
pings with  which  it  had  been  invested  by  the  theo- 
logians. The  poem  inscribed  by  Victor  Hugo  "To 
the  Bishop  Who  Called  Me  Atheist"  might  have  been 
acknowledged  by  Shelley  as  his  own  confession  of 
faith.  Robert  Browning,  in  that  precious  essay  on 
Shelley  which  is  practically  his  only  contribution 
to  English  prose,  says  that  "had  Shelley  lived  he 
would  have  finally  ranged  himself  with  the  Chris- 
tians; his  very  instinct  for  helping  the  weaker  side 
(if  numbers  make  strength),  his  very  'hate  of  hate,' 
which  at  first  mistranslated  itself  into  delirious 
'Queen  Mab'  notes  and  the  like,  would  have  got  clear- 
sighted by  exercise."  And  Browning  goes  on  to  say : 
"Meantime,  as  I  call  Shelley  a  moral  man,  because 
he  was  true,  simple-hearted,  and  brave,  and  because 
what  he  acted  corresponded  with  what  he  knew,  so 
I  call  him  a  man  of  religious  mind,  because  every 
audacious  negative  cast  up  by  him  against  the  Divine 
was  interpenetrated  with  a  mood  of  reverence  and 
adoration,  and  because  I  find  him  everywhere  taking 
for  granted  some  of  the  capital  dogmas  of  Chris- 
tianity, while  most  vehemently  denying  their  histo- 
rical basement."  Nor  are  we  lacking  in  testimony 
from  the  clerical  profession  to  the  same  effect.  What 
the  Rev.  Stopford  Brooke  says  upon  this  subject  may 
be  taken  to  stand  for  what  hundreds  of  other  teachers 
of  religion  have  also  said.  Few  have  done  more  than 
Shelley,  we  are  told,  "to  overthrow  false  conceptions 
of  God,  and  to  shake  the  foundations  of  supersti- 


58  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

tion,  caste,  tyranny,  and  slavery  of  mind  and  body. 
His  desire  to  see  justice  made  universal  between  man 
and  man,  to  extend  the  bounds  of  freedom,  to  pro- 
mote the  love  of  his  fellows,  was  with  him  a  fervent 
passion.  His  poetry  is  steeped  in  these  things  as  a 
summer  garden  in  sunshine.  They  are  part  of  the 
serious  body  of  his  poetry,  and  the  world  will  always 
be  drawn  to  Shelley  for  this  rehgious  gravity  of  his 
teaching.  His  method  was  the  method  of  Jesus 
Christ,  reliance  on  spiritual  force  only,  and  was 
marked  out  in  the  strongest  way." 

The  fortunes  of  Shelley's  poetry  have  been  greatly 
influenced  by  the  early  misconceptions  of  his  hfe 
and  character.  As  Browning  says :  "The  disbelief  in 
him  as  a  man  even  preceded  the  disbehef  in  him  as  a 
writer ;  the  misconstruction  of  his  moral  nature  pre- 
paring the  way  for  the  misappreciation  of  his  intel- 
lectual labours."  He  had  incurred  the  odium  theo- 
logicuTriy  and  no  enmity  is  more  unscrupulous, 
more  relentless,  or  more  vindictive.  The  merely  lit- 
erary abuse  to  which  Keats  was  subjected  seems  al- 
most urbane  in  comparison  with  the  assaults  which 
were  made  upon  Shelley's  character  and  opinions  by 
the  organs  of  British  respectability.  This,  for  ex- 
ample, was  what  The  Gentleman* s  Magazine  had  to 
say  of  him  a  few  months  after  his  death :  "Concern- 
ing the  talents  of  Mr.  Shelley,  we  know  no  more  than 
that  he  published  certain  convulsive  caperings  of 
Pegasus  labouring  under  cholic  pains:  namely,  some 
purely  fantastic  verses,  in  the  hubble-bubble,  toil, 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  59 

and  trouble  style ;  and  as  \.p  Mr.  Shelley's  virtues, 
...  we  ought  as  justly  to^regret  the  decease  of  the 
devil  (if  that  were  possible)  as  of  one  of  his  coadju- 
tors. .  .  .  Percy  Byssche  Shelley  is  a  fitter  subject 
for  a  penitentiary  dying  speech,  than  a  lauding 
elegy;  for  the  muse  of  the  rope  rather  than  of  the 
cypress."  We  now  read  such  a  screed  as  this  with 
sad  amusement,  knowing  how  completely  the  poetry 
of  Shelley,  and  his  character  as  well,  have  "out- 
soared  the  shadow"  of  that  night  of  calumny.  If 
there  are  still  a  few  "Christian  apologists"  of  the 
sort  represented  by  that  English  stranger  who  met 
Shelley  in  the  post  office  at  Pisa,  called  him  "a 
damned  atheist,"  and  knocked  him  down,  they  have  no 
power  to  obscure  the  splendour  of  his  fame.  That 
fame  has  grown  brighter  and  brighter  since  his  death, 
and  Wordsworth  now  remains  the  only  poet  of  the 
earlier  nineteenth-century  group  for  whom  any  con- 
siderable number  of  critics  dispute  with  Shelley  the 
claim  to  supremacy.  It  is  curiously  noticeable  that 
his  poems  do  not  lend  themselves  readily  to  the  pur- 
poses of  familiar  quotation.  Tested  by  Bartlett, 
Byron  has  nearly  ten  times  as  much  of  this  sort  of 
vogue  as  Shelley  has;  but  then,  for  that  matter. 
Young  and  Cowper  and  Moore  have  each  given  cur- 
rency to  many  more  phrases  than  we  can  set  to  the 
credit  of  Shelley.  This  fact,  however,  is  of  little  sig- 
nificance. Lyrics  are  usually  the  least  quotable  of 
poems,  but  despite  that  fact  they  are  our  most  cher- 
ished treasures.    Something  of  what  Shelley  has  come 


60  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

to  mean  to  the  cultivated  intelligence  is  expressed  by 
Mr.  Andrew  Lang,  in  his  address  to  the  shade  of  the 
poet,  when,  speaking  of  the  gradual  extinction  of  life 
upon  this  planet  which  is  prophesied  by  science,  he 
says: 

"If  this  nightmare  be  fulfilled,  perhaps  the  Last  Man,  in  some 
fetid  hut  on  the  ice-bound  Equator,  will  read,  by  a  fading 
lamp  charged  with  the  dregs  of  the  oil  in  his  cruse,  the  poetry 
of  Shelley.  So  reading,  he,  the  latest  of  his  race,  will  not 
wholly  be  deprived  of  those  sights  which  alone  (says  the  name- 
less Greek)  make  life  worth  enduring.  In  your  verse  he  will 
have  sight  of  sky,  and  sea,  and  cloud,  the  gold  of  dawn  and 
the  gloom  of  earthquake  and  eclipse.  He  will  be  face  to  face, 
in  fancy,  with  the  great  powers  that  are  dead,  sun,  and  ocean, 
and  the  illimitable  azure  of  the  heavens.  In  Shelley's  poetry, 
while  Man  endures,  all  those  will  survive;  for  your  'voice  is 
as  the  voice  of  winds  and  tides,'  and  perhaps  more  deathless 
than  aU  of  these,  and  only  perishable  with  the  perishing  of  the 
human  spirit." 

What  was  lost  to  English  poetry,  when  a  sudden 
summer  storm  struck  that  "broad  white  sail  in 
Spezzia's  treacherous  bay,"  and  ended  the  poet's  life 
as  perhaps  he  would  have  wished  it  to  end,  is  a  mat- 
ter beyond  any  human  divination.  His  thirtieth  year 
not  quite  completed,  he  was  taken  "where  Orpheus 
and  where  Homer  are,"  or  rai?iier  where  are  Keats 
and  .^schylus,  for  they  were  his  companions  on  that 
fatal  day.  His  own  poetry  supplies  the  only  words 
fit  to  express  what  is  felt  in  contemplation  of  this 
tragedy.  He  had  become  his  own  Alastor,  and  we 
cannot   now   read   the  poem  of  that  name  without 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  61 

thinking  more  of  its  author  than  of  its  subject  when 
we  come  to  its  closing  lines : 

"Art  and  eloquence. 
And  all  the  shows  o'  the  world,  are  frail  and  vain 
To  weep  a  loss  that  turns  their  light  to  shade. 
It  is  a  woe  'too  deep  for  tears,'  when  all 
Is  reft  at  once,  when  some  surpassing  spirit. 
Whose  light  adorned  the  world  around  it,  leaves 
Those  who  remain  behind  nor  sobs  nor  groans. 
The  passionate  tumult  of  a  clinging  hope; 
But  pale  despair  and  cold  tranquillity. 
Nature's  vast  frame,  the  web  of  human  things. 
Birth  and  the  grave,  that  are  not  as  they  were." 

Shelley  lies  buried  by  the  side  of  Keats  in  the 
Protestant  Cemetery  at  Rome.  His  ashes  were  sent 
there  by  Trelawny,  who  in  the  spring  of  the  year 
following  the  poet's  death  caused  two  tombs  to  be 
prepared,  in  one  of  which  the  remains  of  Shelley  were 
deposited.  Upon  the  simple  stone  that  covered  his 
ashes,  besides  the  name  and  the  necessary  dates,  were 
cut  the  words  "Cor  cordium"  of  Leigh  Hunt's  choice, 
and  to  them  Trelawny  added  the  Shakespearean 
lines : 

"Nothing  of  him  that  doth  fade 
But  doth  suffer  a  sea-change 
Into  something  rich  and  strange." 

Violets  grow  about  the  stone,  and  the  shape  of  their 
leaves  is  exquisitely  symbolical  of  the  inscription. 
For  nearly  sixty  years  nothing  was  heard  by  the 
directors  of  the  Cemetery  from  the  Englishman  who 
had  bought  the  plot.     Early  in  1881,  a  letter  was 


62  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 

received  from  Mr.  Trelawny  saying  that,  as  he  was 
now  very  old,  he  wished  to  prepare  for  his  death, 
and  requesting  that  the  second  tomb  be  made  ready 
for  his  ashes.  In  August  of  that  year  he  died,  at 
the  age  of  eighty-eight.  His  body  was  burned,  and 
a  friend  brought  the  ashes  to  the  resting-place  thus 
provided  for  them.  The  following  lines  bear  witness 
to  the  friendship  by  which  the  poet  and  the  wanderer 
remained  united  in  spirit  throughout  the  intervening 
years. 

"These  are  two  friends  whose  lives  were  undivided; 
So  let  their  memory  be  now  they  have  glided 
Under  the  grave;  let  not  their  bones  be  parted. 
For  their  two  hearts  in  life  were  single-hearted." 

This  incident  is  not  as  irrelevant  as  it  might  seem, 
for  it  is  typical  of  the  feehngs  with  which  Shelley 
was  regarded  by  every  one  who  enjoyed  his  intimacy. 
As  Symonds  reminds  us  in  his  biography  of  the  poet : 
"Shelley  in  his  lifetime  bound  those  who  knew  him 
with  a  chain  of  loyal  affection,  impressing  observers 
so  essentially  different  as  Hogg,  Byron,  Peacock, 
Leigh  Hunt,  Trelawny,  Medwin,  Williams,  with  the 
conviction  that  he  was  the  gentlest,  purest,  bravest, 
and  most  spiritual  being  they  had  ever  met."  And 
the  number  of  those  who  feel  for  him  as  these  felt 
has  gone  on  increasing  year  by  year,  until  his  posi- 
tion as  the  best  beloved  of  English  poets  has  been 
placed  beyond  dispute.  The  one  great  poet  now  liv- 
ing, who  is  closer  to  Shelley  in  spiritual  kinship  than 
any  between  them,  has  given  us  an  exquisite  tribute 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  63 

to  his  memory  in  the  sonnet  which  has  these  for  its 
closing  lines : 

"O  heart  whose  beating  blood  was  running  song, 
O  sole  thing  sweeter  than  thine  own  songs  were. 
Help  us  for  thy  free  love's  sake  to  be  free. 
True  for  thy  truth's  sake,  for  thy  strength's  sake  strong, 
Till  very  liberty  make  clean  and  fair 

The  nursing  earth  as  the  sepulchral  sea." 


©corge  ©orJ)on  36i?ron 

In  discussing  the  content  of  Shelley's  poetry,  we 
found  it  necessary  to  deal  with  him  very  largely  as 
the  product  of  his  age,  and  especially  as  the  preacher 
of  the  revolutionary  gospel  in  its  more  spiritual 
phases  and  developments.  Turning  now  to  Byron, 
we  again  find  the  Revolution  in  the  background  of 
nearly  all  that  he  said  and  did,  we  find  in  it  the  ex- 
planation of  nearly  all  that  he  was.  In  saying  this 
I  would  not  be  taken  to  give  unqualified  assent  to  the 
doctrine  of  Taine  which  accounts  for  literature  as  a 
product  of  the  race,  the  age,  and  the  environment. 
Criticism  has  gone  far  beyond  that  doctrine,  and 
recognises  the  claims  of  the  incalculable  element  of 
individual  genius.  But  with  Byron  and  Shelley  alike, 
the  circumstances  amid  which  they  were  nurtured, 
the  intellectual  and  moral  atmosphere  of  the  period  in 
which  they  lived,  count  for  much  more  than  they  do 
with  most  poets,  more  even  than  they  count  for  with 
the  contemporaries  of  these  men.  I  have  spoken  of 
Shelley  as  the  child  of  the  Revolution  in  its  spiritual 
aspect;  I  must  speak  of  Byron  as  the  voice  of  the 
Revolution  in  its  temper  of  revolt,  its  bhnd  fury,  its 
reckless  destructiveness.  Of  course  such  distinctions 
as  these  are  by  no  means  hard  and  fast,  but  they 

64 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      65 

express  the  fundamental  contrast  between  the  two 
poets.  The  intellect  of  Byron  was  less  const ructivej^ 
than  destructive,  in  that  of  Shelley  the  ratio  becomes 
inverted.  Byron's  influence  was  in  the  main  negative, 
his  was  "the  spirit  that  denies";  Shelley's  influence 
was  in  the  main  positive,  and  he  was  concerned  far 
more  with  the  affirmation  of  truth  than  with  the 
denial  of  error.  Professor  Dowden  embodies  this 
distinction  in  the  following  beautiful  simile:  "As  the 
wave  of  revolution  rolls  onward,  driven  forth  from 
the  vast  volcanic  upheaval  in  France,  and  as  it  be- 
comes a  portion  of  the  literary  movement  of  Great 
Britain,  its  dark  and  hissing  crest  may  be  the  poetry 
of  Byron;  but  over  the  tumultuous  wave  hangs  an 
iris  of  beauty  and  promise,  and  that  foam-bow  of 
hope,  flashing  and  failing,  and  ever  reappearing  as 
the  wave  sweeps  on,  is  the  poetry  of  Shelley."  As 
the  qualities  of  the  two  poets  diff*er,  so  have  their 
fates  proved  diverse.  Amid  the  fury  of  the  tempest, 
the  still  small  voice  is  heard  by  but  few,  yet  to  those 
whose  ears  are  attuned  to  hear  it  the  utterance  is 
fraught  with  a  deeper  meaning  than  is  found  in  the 
sound  of  the  storm,  and  it  remains  a  memory  and  an 
inspiration  long  after  the  heavens  have  cleared.  In 
his  own  time,  the  poetry  of  Byron  was  one  of  the 
most  tremendous  intellectual  forces  that  had  ever 
stirred  the  souls  of  men ;  the  poetry  of  Shelley,  on 
the  other  hand,  fell  almost  unheeded  upon  the  gen- 
eral ear,  and  was  slow  in  winning  its  way  to  the 
exalted  place  which  it  was  destined  to  occupy  in  the 


66      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

affections  of  mankind.  The  conditions  are  now  al- 
most completely  reversed,  and,  while  the  poetry  of 
Byron  has  lost  its  hold  upon  the  mature  intelligence, 
the  poetry  of  Shelley  has  become  strengthened  from 
year  to  year  in  its  influence,  because  its  appeal  is 
made  to  those  instincts  and  sentiments  which  are 
the  most  enduring  in  human  nature.  In  a  word,  the 
poetry  of  Shelley  has  everlasting  value  because  it  is 
endowed  with  everlasting  beauty  and  truth;  the 
poetry  of  Byron,  on  the  other  hand,  has  largely  spent 
its  force,  and  its  present  appeal  is  made  directly  to 

the  immature  mind  alone,  or  indirectly  to  the  mind 
hat  takes  a  greater  satisfaction  in  renewing  the  life 
lof  the  past  than  in  living  in  the  present  or  in  con- 
jtemplating  the  future. 

Byron  was  four  years  older  than  Shelley,  and  out- 
lived him  by  two;  the  lives  of  these  poets  thus  ran 
closely  side  by  side,  and  their  environment  was  prac- 
tically the  same.  How  diff'erently  they  reacted  to 
that  environment  does  not  need  to  be  set  forth  in  de- 
tail. Byron,  like  Shelley,  came  to  manhood  at  a  time 
when  the  revolutionary  ideas  had  lost  much  of  their 
force,  and  when  the  conservative  reaction  seemed 
well  under  way.  The  intellectual  and  emotional  move- 
ment of  which  Byron  was  the  central  figure  is  to  be 
described  rather  as  a  second  revolution  than  as  a 
direct  continuation  of  the  first.  It  was  also  a  moral 
revolution,  an  uprising  of  the  spirit  against  all  the 
hypocrisies  and  empty  forms  that  so  weighed  it  down 
in  England  and  elsewhere.     It  was  a  revolt,  among 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      67 

other  things,  against  what  Mr.  John  Morley  calls 
"that  mean  and  poor  form  of  domesticity  which 
has  always  been  too  apt  to  fascinate  the  English 
imagination,  ever  since  the  last  great  effort  of  the 
Rebellion,  and  which  rose  to  the  climax  of  its  popu- 
larity when  George  III.  won  all  hearts  by  living  like 
a  farmer."  As  Mr.  Morley  goes  on  to  say :  "Instead 
of  the  fierce  light  beating  about  a  throne,  it  played 
lambently  upon  a  sty.  And  the  nation  who  admired, 
imitated.  When  the  Regent  came,  and  with  him  that 
coarse  profligacy  which  has  alternated  with  cloudy 
insipidity  in  the  annals  of  the  line,  the  honest  part  of 
the  world,  out  of  antipathy  to  the  son,  was  driven 
even  further  into  domestic  sentimentality  of  a  greasy 
kind  than  it  had  gone  from  affection  for  the  sire." 
The  society  that  could  deserve  such  a  characterisa- 
tion as  this  needed  a  Byron  to  arouse  it  from  its 
sluggishness  and  apathy.  Whatever  his  intellectual 
faults,  whatever  the  recklessness  with  which  he  made 
his  attack  upon  the  bulwarks  of  respectability,  his 
influence  was  on  the  whole  uplifting,  and  we  must 
agree  with  our  author  in  saying :  "His  fire,  his  lofty 
spaciousness  of  outlook,  his  spirited  interest  in  great 
national  causes,  his  romance,  and  the  passion  both  of 
his  animosity  and  his  sympathy,  acted  for  a  while 
like  an  electric  current,  and  every  one  within  his  influ- 
ence became  ashamed  to  barter  the  large  heritage 
of  manhood,  with  its  many  realms  and  illimitable 
interests,  for  the  sordid  ease  of  the  hearth  and  the 
good  word  of  the  unworthy."     It  was  well  that  the 


68      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

souls  of  men  living  in  "a  society  that  the  inward  faith 
had  abandoned,  but  which  clung  to  every  outward 
ordinance,  which  only  remembered  that  man  had 
property,  and  forgot  that  he  had  a  spirit,"  should  be 
stirred  in  some  such  way  as  this.  That  it  was  thus 
stirred  is  one  of  the  capital  facts  of  the  moral  history 
of  this  age,  a  fact  evidenced  alike  by  the  bitterness 
of  the  denunciation  with  which  the  "satanic"  influ- 
ence of  the  poet  was  assailed,  and  by  the  new  impulse 
which  he  gave  to  the  forces  of  revolt  and  emotional 
discontent  with  existing  conditions. 

This  influence  was  European  in  its  extent.  To  us, 
Byron  is  only  one  of  the  half  dozen  great  English 
poets  of  his  time,  and  from  a  strictly  literary  point 
of  view  not  the  most  important.  But  to  Europe 
at  large  he  was,  and  has  remained,  the  single  com- 
manding figure  in  the  English  Hterature  of  the 
period.  From  the  standpoint  of  Continental  appre- 
ciation, Byron  was  the  only  English  poet  who 
counted;  he  stood  first,  and  the  rest  were  nowhere. 
Even  in  our  own  time,  this  exaggeration  of  his  im- 
portance prevails  in  the  general  European  criticism 
of  English  poetry.  It  is  only  within  the  last  few 
years  that  French  criticism,  for  example,  has  dis- 
covered Burns,  and  Shelley,  and  Wordsworth,  while 
German  criticism,  with  all  its  receptiveness  for 
the  literature  of  other  nations,  has  not  yet  done  any- 
thing hke  relative  justice  to  the  claims  of  Byron's 
great  contemporaries.  The  explanation  of  this 
critical  aberration  is  not  difficult.     Mr.   Swinburne 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      69 

has  explained  it  in  part,  although  with  his  customary 
vehemence  of  exaggeration,  by  saying  that  Byron's 
poetical  form  is  so  bad  that  it  becomes  improved  by 
translation.     He  writes : 

"On  taking  up  a  fairly  good  version  of  'Childe  Harold's  Pil- 
grimage' in  French  or  Italian  prose,  a  reader  whose  eyes  and 
ears  are  not  hopelessly  sealed  against  all  distinction  of  good 
from  bad  in  rhythm  or  in  style  will  infallibly  be  struck  by  the 
vast  improvement  which  the  text  has  undergone  in  the  course 
of  translation.  The  blundering,  floundering,  lumbering,  and 
stumbling  stanzas,  transmuted  into  prose  and  transfigured 
into  grammar,  reveal  the  real  and  latent  force  of  rhetorical 
energy  that  is  in  them:  the  gasping,  ranting,  wheezing,  broken- 
winded  verse  has  been  transformed  into  really  effective  and 
fluent  oratory.  ...  It  is  impossible  to  express  how  much 
*Childe  Harold'  gains  by  being  done  out  of  wretchedly  bad 
metre  into  decently  good  prose :  the  New  Testament  did  not 
gain  more  by  being  translated  out  of  canine  Greek  into  divine 
English." 

But  this  is  not  the  whole  of  the  explanation.  The 
laudation  of  Byron  on  the  part  of  Continental  critics 
results  chiefly  from  the  fact  that  he  gave  voice 
to  ideals  and  aspirations  that  were  the  common  prop- 
erty of  the  enlightened  part  of  European  opinion, 
and  that  were  less  distinctively  English  than  they 
were  French  or  German,  Italian  or  Spanish,  Russian, 
Polish,  or  Scandinavian.  The  effectiveness  of 
Byron's  appeal  is  properly  to  be  judged  only  when 
we  take  into  account  its  influence  upon  such  diff*erent 
types  of  men  as  Goethe,  Taine,  Mazzini,  Castelar, 
Pushkin,  Mickiewicz,  and  Paludan-Miiller.  These 
men,  each  in  his  own  way,  besides  many  others  less 


70      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

prominent,  have  given  eloquent  testimony  to  the  ele- 
mental energy  with  which  the  poetry  of  Byron  stirred 
the  waters  of  European  thought.  We  find  his  influ- 
ence everywhere  in  the  European  literature  of  the 
century.  We  find  it  in  the  greater  literatures  of 
the  Continent,  and  we  find  it  also  in  the  lesser  litera- 
tures of  Greece,  and  Portugal,  and  the  Balkan 
States.  We  find  it  in  Hugo,  Lamartine,  Delavigne, 
Musset,  and  Flaubert.  We  find  it  in  Wilhelm  Miiller, 
Chamisso,  Platen,  Immermann,  Borne,  and  Heine. 
We  find  it,  in  short,  wherever  literature  has  sought 
I  to  renew  its  life,  to  escape  from  the  bondage  of  tra- 
I  dition,  and  to  reassert  the  claims  of  the  individual 
>pspirit.  Tiiis  influence  has  been  so  great  partly  be- 
j  I  cause  Byron  dealt  with  large  and  simple  ideas,  and 
partly  because  his  work  reflected  so  many  of  the 
external  happenings  of  his  time  and  so  many  of  the 
feehngs  and  impulses  which  those  happenings  were 
arousing  in  the  souls  of  the  generation  that  had  out- 
lived the  early  reaction  against  the  revolutionary 
movement,  and  were  again  pressing  forward  toward 
the  realisation  of  its  fundamental  aims.  When  Byron 
"was  struck  hard  by  events,"  says  Professor  Dowden, 
"there  came  a  resonant  response;  his  strangely  dis- 
i  cordant  powers  were  for  the  moment  fused,  and  he 
uttered  his  feelings  with  incomparable  energy  and 
directness.  Pride  and  passion,  love  and  hatred,  grief 
and  joy,  flowed  together  and  flowed  forth  in  one 
strong,  abounding  stream." 

The  quality  which  we  call  Byronism  may  be  illus- 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      71 

trated  by  countless  passages  from  the  poet's  writ- 
ings. Probably  the  most  typical  passages  are  to  be 
found  in  "Childe  Harold,"  which  Byron  himself  called 
"a  fine  indistinct  piece  of  poetical  desolation."  We 
find  it,  for  example,  in  this  stanza : 

"He,  who  grown  aged  in  this  world  of  woe. 
In  deeds,  not  years,  piercing  the  depths  of  life. 
So  that  no  wonder  waits  him;  nor  below 
Can  love,  or  sorrow,  fame,  ambition,  strife. 
Cut  to  his  heart  again  with  the  keen  knife 
Of  silent,  sharp  endurance;  he  can  tell 
Why  thought  seeks  refuge  in  lone  caves  yet  rife 
With  airy  images,  and  shapes  which  dwell 
Still  unimpair'd,  though  old,  in  the  soul's  haunted  cell.** 

Again  we  find  it  in  this : 

"Existence  may  be  borne,  and  the  deep  root 
Of  life  and  sufferance  makes  its  firm  abode 
In  bare  and  desolated  bosoms;  mute 
The  camel  labours  with  the  heaviest  load. 
And  the  wolf  dies  in  silence, — not  bestow'd 
In  vain  should  such  example  be;  if  they. 
Things  of  ignoble  or  of  savage  mood. 
Endure  and  shrink  not,  we  of  nobler  clay 
May  temper  it  to  bear, — it  is  but  for  a  day." 

And  still  again  we  find  it  in  these: 

"And  if  my  voice  break  forth,  'tis  not  that  now 
I  shrink  from  what  is  suifer'd:  let  him  speak 
Who  hath  beheld  decline  upon  my  brow. 
Or  seen  my  mind's  convulsion  leave  it  weak; 
But  in  this  page  a  record  will  I  seek. 
Not  in  the  air  shall  these  my  words  disperse, 
Though  I  be  ashes;  a  far  hour  shall  wreak 
The  deep  prophetic  fulness  of  this  verse. 
And  pile  on  human  heads  the  mountain  of  my  curse  I 


72      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

"That  curse  shall  be  Forgiveness. — Have  I  not — 
Hear  me,  my  mother  Earth !  behold  it,  Heaven ! — 
Have  I  not  had  to  wrestle  with  my  lot? 
Have  I  not  suffer'd  things  to  be  forgiven? 
Have  I  not  had  my  brain  sear'd,  my  heart  riven, 
Hopes  sapp'd,  name  blighted,  Life's  life  lied  away? 
And  only  not  to  desperation  driven. 
Because  not  altogether  of  such  clay 
As  rots  into  the  souls  of  those  whom  I  survey." 

It  is  easy  to  say  that  there  is  something  morbid  in 
these  self -revelations.  What  the  robust  judgment  of 
Carlyle  thought  about  them  is  well  known,  and  in  our 
modern  reaction  against  B3"ronism  we  have  probably 
been  too  apt  to  join  with  Carlyle  in  his  scorn  of  all 
such  caterwaulings.  We  are  inchned  to  ask  with 
Arnold 

"What  helps  it  now,  that  Byron  bore, 
With  haughty  scorn  which  mock'd  the  smart, 
Through  Europe  to  the  ^tolian  shore 
The  pageant  of  his  bleeding  heart?'* 

But  we  must  remember  that  Arnold  himself  was  one 
of  the  stoutest  defenders  of  Byron's  poetical  fame, 
and  it  may  also  be  profitable  to  recall  the  fact  that 
Mazzini,  who  stood  for  something  very  different  from 
Byronism,  who  supplemented  the  revolutionary  de- 
mand for  the  rights  of  man  with  an  insistent  appeal 
for  the  equal  recognition  of  the  duties  of  man,  could 
write  of  Byron  in  such  terms  as  these: 

"Never  did  'the  eternal  spirit  of  the  chainless  mind'  make  a 
brighter  apparition  amongst  us.  He  seems  at  times  a  trans- 
formation of  that  immortal  Prometheus,  of  whom  he  has  writ- 
ten so  nobly;  whose  cry  of  agony,  yet  of  futurity,  sounded 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      78 

above  the  cradle  of  the  European  world;  and  whose  grand  and 
mysterious  form,  transfigured  by  time,  reappears  from  age  to 
age,  between  the  entombment  of  one  epoch  and  the  accession  of 
another;  to  wail  forth  the  lament  of  genius,  tortured  by  the 
presentiment  of  things  it  will  not  see  realised  in  its  time." 

It  is  impossible  to  deal  with  Byronism  without 
thinking  at  the  same  time  of  Wertherism,  which  was 
its  eighteenth-century  counterpart,  and  of  which  it 
was  so  close  a  reflex.  The  words  which  have  just 
been  quoted  from  Mazzini  might  also  be  applied  to 
Goethe,  with  whom,  indeed,  Byron  is  coupled  in  the 
remarkable  essay  from  which  the  passage  is  taken. 
I  mean,  of  course,  the  youthful  Goethe  in  the  days 
of  his  storm  and  stress,  who  was,  like  Byron, 

"Wandering  between  two  worlds,  one  dead, 
The  other  powerless  to  be  born." 

Perhaps  even  Byron  might  have  attained  to  some- 
thing like  serenity  of  soul  had  he  lived  to  the  great 
age  of  Goethe.  What  Carlyle  says  about  "Werther" 
and  the  time  in  which  it  was  written  bears  directly 
upon  the  present  comparison. 

"That  nameless  unrest,  the  blind  struggle  of  a  soul  in  bondage, 
that  high,  sad,  longing  discontent  which  was  agitating  every 
bosom,  had  driven  Goethe  almost  to  despair.  All  felt  it;  he 
alone  could  give  it  voice.  And  here  lies  the  secret  of  his 
popularity;  in  his  deep  susceptive  heart  he  felt  a  thousand 
times  more  keenly  what  every  one  was  feeling;  with  the  creative 
gift  which  belonged  to  him  as  a  poet,  he  bodied  it  forth  into 
visible  shape,  gave  it  a  local  habitation  and  a  name;  and  so 
made  himself  the  spokesman  of  his  generation.    'Werther'  is 


t 


74      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

but  the  cry  of  that  dim,  rooted  pain  under  which  all  thoughtful 
men  of  a  certain  age  were  languishing:  it  paints  the  misery,  it 
passionately  utters  the  complaint;  and  heart  and  voice  all  over 
Europe  loudly  and  at  once  respond  to  it.  True,  it  prescribes 
no  remedy;  for  that  was  a  far  different,  far  harder  enterprise, 
to  which  other  years  and  a  higher  culture  were  required;  but 
even  this  utterance  of  pain,  even  this  little,  for  the  present  is 
grasped  at,  and  with  eager  sympathy  appropriated  in  every 
bosom." 

This  diagnosis  of  Wertherism  fits  the  case  of  Byron- 
ism  with  almost  equal  exactness;  the  words  at  once 
describe  its  nature,  set  forth  its  essential  limita- 
tions, and  account  for  its  widespread  influence.  The 
Weltschmerz  which  found  intensified  expression  in 
Goethe's  youthful  romance,  and  again  a  generation 
later  in  Byron's  melancholy  outpourings,  is  never  al- 
together absent  from  literature,  but  there  are  not 
many  periods  in  which  it  takes  possession  of  so  many 
minds,  and  becomes  so  distinctly  the  characteristic 
note  of  the  age,  as  it  did  in  the  two  periods  here  set 
side  by  side.  The  epochs  of  Wertherism  and  of 
Byronism  were  epochs  of  morbid  sensibility  and  un- 
settled convictions.  The  emotional  wave  which  thus 
twice  reared  its  crest  was  slow  to  subside,  and  when 
it  did  at  last  spend  its  force,  there  were  many  who 
felt  that  something  had  been  lost  out  of  life,  that 
the  philosophy  of  comfortable  acquiescence  was  an 
unsatisfying  substitute  for  the  philosophy  of  revolt. 
That  the  wave  did  subside  is  a  matter  of  the  intel- 
lectual history  of  the  century.  In  England,  as  we 
shall  see,  the  turbulent  temper  of  the  revolutionary 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      75 

spirit  gave  place  to  the  serener  temper  and  the  re- 
newed hopefulness  that  were  to  be  found  in  the  poetry 
of  Wordsworth.  In  France,  the  magnificent  faith  of 
the  master  poet  of  the  century  put  to  shame  the 
voices  of  doubt  and  despair.  In  Germany,  the  magic 
of  Heine's  genius  dissolved  despondency  in  irony, 
and  with  a  smile  upon  its  lips,  the  human  spirit  made 
reassertion  of  its  sovereignty,  and  bade  defiance  to 
all  the  malign  fates. 

We  have  seen  that  Byronism  was  essentially  a  re- 
crudescence of  Wertherism,  but  it  was  also  some- 
thing more  than  that.  In  seeking  for  its  origins,  we 
must  take  Rousseau  into  the  account  no  less  than 
Goethe.  How  deeply  Byron  was  influenced  by 
Rousseau  is  made  evident  by  the  stanzas  which 
"Childe  Harold"  gives  to  the  scenes  associated  with 
the  author  of  "La  Nouvelle  Heloi'se"  : 

"Here  the  self-torturing  sophist,  wild  Rousseau, 
The  apostle  of  affliction,  he  who  threw 
Enchantment  over  passion,  and  from  woe 
Wrung  overwhelming  eloquence,  first  drew 
The  breath  which  made  him  wretched ;  yet  he  knew 
How  to  make  madness  beautiful,  and  cast 
O'er  erring  deeds  and  thoughts,  a  heavenly  hue 
Of  words,  like  sunbeams,  dazzling  as  they  past 
The  eyes,  which  o'er  them  shed  tears  feelingly  and  fast." 

His  was  the  love 

"Of  ideal  beauty,  which  became 
In   him   existence,    and   o'erflowing   teems 
Along  his  burning  page,  distemper'd  though  it 


76      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

And  to  him,  "phrensied  by  disease  or  woe,"  there 
came  such  inspiration  as  came  from  the  Pythian  cave, 

"Those  oracles  which  set  the  world  in  flame, 
Nor  ceased  to  burn  till  kingdoms  were  no  more." 

Sainte-Beuve,  who  certainly  knew  good  criticism 
when  he  saw  it,  recognised  in  Byron's  characterisa- 
tion of  Rousseau  a  masterly  piece  of  sympathetic 
analysis.  Dr.  A.  E.  Hancock,  in  his  excellent  study 
of  "The  French  Revolution  and  the  English  Poets," 
a  work  which  supplements  Professor  Dowden's  vol- 
ume of  lectures  upon  the  same  subject  in  several  im- 
portant respects,  makes  a  careful  examination  of 
Byron's  indebtedness  to  Rousseau,  and  finds  the  two 
writers  to  have  much  in  common.    He  says : 

"Rousseau  and  Byron  spoke  for  hosts  of  comrades;  they 
spoke  the  common  experience.  Man,  exiled  in  spirit  from 
existing  institutions,  was  flung  back  upon  himself  and  his  own 
thoughts;  his  spirit  was  imprisoned  within  his  own  experience; 
he  became,  therefore,  subjective  and  intensely  self-conscious. 
Finding  no  satisfaction  in  the  world  about  him,  he  turned  his 
attention  to  himself,  scrutinised  his  own  soul,  and  forged  a 
subjective  world  of  ideal  forms.  Under  the  spell  and  incite- 
ment of  the  contemporary  outburst  of  romanticism  and  im- 
agination, he  was  lured,  perforce,  into  the  idealising  processes 
which  resulted  in  the  malady  of  the  century,  the  Weltschmerz; 
that  spiritual  agony  caused  by  the  inadequacy  of  the  world  of 
fact  to  satisfy  the  world  of  the  idealist's  brain." 

The  message  of  Rousseau  is  commonly  summed  up 
in  the  appeal  for  a  "return  to  nature."  There  are 
many  ways  of  returning  to  nature,  and  many  degrees 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      77 

of  communion  with  her.  The  rich  spiritual  reward 
that  Wordsworth  was  to  win  from  this  communion 
was  not  for  Byron.  To  the  former,  nature  proved 
a  stimulus  to  thought,  a  means  whereby  reflection 
was  heightened,  and  human  Hfe  given  a  fuller  mean- 
ing. To  the  latter,  nature  was  not  so  much  a  stim- 
ulus as  a  sedative,  not  merely  a  refuge,  but  a  means  of 
forgetfulness. 

"I  live  not  in  myself,  but  I  become 

Portion  of  that  around  me;  and  to  me 

High  mountains  are  a  feeling." 

"Are  not  the  mountains,  waves,  and  skies,  a  part 
Of  me  and  of  my  soul,  as  I  of  them?" 

There  are  no  more  familiar  verses  in  Byron  than 
these,  and  they  occur  in  direct  connection  with  his 
tribute  to  Rousseau.  The  latter,  however,  was  without 
the  gift  of  wit,  which  Byron  possessed  in  the  fullest 
measure.  Although  he  was  never  influenced  as  deeply 
and  directly  by  Voltaire  as  he  was  by  Rousseau,  upon 
an  important  side — perhaps  the  most  important  side — 
of  his  genius  he  shared  in  the  inheritance  which  the 
philosopher  of  Femey  had  bequeathed  to  European 
thought.  His  characterisation  of  Voltaire  is  almost 
a  characterisation  of  himself  as  the  poet  of  "Don 
Juan"  and  the  "Vision  of  Judgment."  In  those 
poems  he  reveals  himself,  like  Voltaire,  as 

"Fire  and  fickleness,  a  child 
Most  mutable  in  wishes,  but  in  mind 
A  wit  as  various, — gay,  grave,  sage,  or  wild, — 
Historian,  bard,  philosopher,  combined; 


78      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

He  multiplied  himself  among  mankind, 
The  Proteus  of  their  talents:  But  his  own 
Breathed  most  in  ridicule, — which,  as  the  wind, 
Blew  where  it  listed,  lay  all  things  prone,— 
Now  to  o'erthrow  a  fool,  and  now  to  shake  a  throne." 

It  is  common  to  speak  of  Byron  as  a  pessimist, 
and  Schopenhauer  found  in  him  a  shining  example 
of  that  view  of  the  world  which  finds  the  soul  of 
things  to  be  pain,  and  evil  to  be  rooted  in  the  very 
heart  of  human  life.  Schopenhauer  was  particu- 
larly fond  of  quoting  the  last  stanza  of  the  poem 
"Euthanasia"  as  a  typical  expression  of  the  pes- 
simistic philosophy. 

"Count  o'er  the  joys  thine  hours  have  seen, 
Count  o'er  thy  days  from  anguish  free. 
And  know,  whatever  thou  hast  been, 
'Tis  something  better  not  to  be." 

Taken  by  themselves,  these  words  were  well  enough 
suited  to  Schopenhauer's  purpose,  which  was  that  of 
proving  all  the  great  poets  to  have  been,  in  a  sense, 
the  forerunners  or  unconscious  exponents  of  the  sys- 
tem of  thought  which  he  worked  out  with  so  much 
of  ingenuity  and  philosophical  insight.  But  the 
ascription  of  pessimism  to  the  work  of  Byron  as  a 
whole  embodies  a  superficial  judgment,  and  the  note 
of  despair  is  not  the  characteristic  note  of  his  poetry. 
It  would  be  straining  the  point  to  describe  Byron  as 
a  poet  of  faith  in  the  future  happiness  of  mankind. 
When  we  think  of  the  sublime  faith  of  Shelley,  Byron 
seems  to  offer  as  sharp  a  contrast  as  is  possible.    He 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      79 

was  essentially  a  destructive  force,  bent  upon  tear- 
ing away  those  barriers  to  human  progress  which  were 
defended  by  the  champions  of  religious  and  social 
conservatism,  and  the  radiant  vision  of  a  renovated 
world  was  withheld  from  his  eyes.  Yet  even  for 
Byron  there  were  rifts  in  the  storm  clouds,  and  occa- 
sional glimpses  of  the  blue  sky  beyond.  Pessimism 
is  both  a  mood  and  a  philosophical  doctrine.  With 
Schopenhauer  it  was  the  latter,  but  the  host  of  those 
who  have  been  fascinated  by  his  exposition  thereof 
are  without  the  analytic  power  needed  to  follow  the 
argument,  and  are  far  from  being  the  reasoned 
pessimists  that  the  philosopher  would  have  them. 
Pessimism  as  a  mood,  on  the  other  hand,  is  an  attri- 
bute of  most  serious  minds  at  one  time  or  another. 
What  Arnold  calls 

"The  barren  optimistic  sophistries 
Of  comfortable  moles" 

are  so  crass  and  unendurable  to  the  mind  of  earnest 
bent,  that  it  is  often  driven  to  the  extreme  of  reaction 
against  a  view  which  calmly  ignores  some  of  the 
most  obvious  facts  of  life,  and  to  indulge  itself  in 
a  pessimism  which  it  feels  rather  than  believes.  In  its 
common  use,  the  term  pessimism  is  confounded  with 
all  sorts  of  things,  with  despondency,  for  example, 
with  righteous  indignation  at  the  maladjustments  of 
society,  or  with  that  cynicism  which  is  one  of  the 
basest  of  all  mental  attributes.  This  misuse  of  the 
word  may  be  illustrated  in  our  own  time  by  its  f re- 


80      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

quent  application  to  the  work  of  Ibsen,  who  was  one 
of  the  most  passionate  idealists  that  ever  lived,  and 
the  very  fierceness  of  whose  indignation  against  the 
existing  social  order  sprang  from  a  deep  conviction 
that  man  has  it  within  his  own  power  to  shape  Hfe  in 
fairer  and  nobler  forms  than  he  has  ever  known. 
There  is  something  of  this  temper  in  Byron,  there  is 
also,  unfortunately,  something  more  of  cynicism.  Of 
philosophy,  whether  pessimistic  or  optimistic,  there 
is  none  worth  speaking  of,  and  the  deep  mood  of 
pessimism  finds  hardly  any  expression  in  his  poetry. 
When  we  examine  the  stanza  of  which  Schopenhauer 
made  so  much,  we  cannot  escape  the  feeling  that 
haunts  us  even  in  the  presence  of  the  best  of  Byron's 
work,  the  feeling  that  we  are  in  the  presence 
of  rhetoric  rather  than  of  passion.  The  sug- 
gestion of  pose,  of  insincerity,  is  rarely  absent; 
we  feel  that  there  is  some  degree  of  truth  in  Car- 
lyle's  description  of  B3n'on  as  writing,  "over  many 
reams  of  paper,  the  following  sentence,  with  varia- 
tions :  Saw  ever  the  world  one  greater  or  unhappier  .f"' 
The  true  note  of  pessimism  is  not  heard  in  Byron, 
nor  is  it  heard  in  the  European  literature  which  re- 
flected Byronism.  It  is  heard  at  its  deepest  in 
Leopardi;  it  is  heard  in  such  modern  writers  as 
have  been  least  influenced  by  Byron,  such  writers  as 
Tourguenieff  and  William  Morris  and  Matthew 
Arnold.  The  stanza  from  "Euthanasia"  seems  the 
merest  phrase-making  when  set  beside  the  closing 
lines  of  "Dover  Beach." 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      81 

"For  the  world,  which  seems 
To  lie  before  us  like  a  land  of  dreams, 
So  various,  so  beautiful,  so  new, 
Hath  really  neither  joy,  nor  love,  nor  light. 
Nor  certitude,  nor  peace,  nor  help  for  pain; 
And  we  are  here  as  on  a  darkling  plain 
Swept  with  confused  alarms  of  struggle  and  flight. 
Where  ignorant  armies  clash  by  night." 


Mr.  Holger  Drachmann,  the  Danish  translator  of 
Byron,  once  told  me,  in  response  to  a  question,  that 
he  still  considered  Byron  a  vital  force  in  European 
literature,  but  he  hastened  to  add  that  it  was  only 
the  Byron  of  "Don  Juan"  who  had  thus  survived. 
Dr.  Brandes,  the  acute  critic,  Mr.  Drachmann's 
countryman,  has  written  of  Byron  at  great  length 
in  the  volume  entitled  "Naturalism  in  England,"  and 
it  is  particularly  of  "Don  Juan"  that  he  is  speak- 
ing when  he  discourses  as  follows: 


"What  speech!  What  tones  amid  the  stillness  of  death  in  op- 
pressed Europe!  They  cut  through  the  political  atmosphere 
and  echoed  far  and  wide;  no  word  of  Lord  Byron  fell  unheard 
to  the  ground,  and  the  countless  ranks  of  the  exiled  and  the 
persecuted,  the  oppressed  and  the  conspirators  all  over  Europe 
fixed  their  eyes  on  this  one  man,  who  alone  stood  erect  amidst 
the  universal  depression  to  a  low  level  of  both  intelligence  and 
character,  fair  as  an  Apollo,  brave  as  an  Achilles,  prouder  than 
all  the  European  monarchs  together.  He,  the  inviolate 
Enghsh  peer,  became  the  organ  for  the  dumb  bitterness  of 
feeling  which  tortured  the  best  souls  of  Europe,  the  souls  of 
these  who  most  loved  freedom,  as  unchecked  and  unpunished 
he  poured  forth  the  awful  outbursts  of  his  revolutionary 
wrath." 


82      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

Listen  to  his  incisive  speech,  and  note  the  passion 
that  burns  beneath  the  playfulness  of  its  manner. 

"But  never  mind; — 'God  save  the  king!'  and  kings! 

For  if  he  don't,  I  doubt  if  men  will  longer — 
I  think  I  hear  a  little  bird,  who  sings 

The  people  by  and  by  will  be  the  stronger: 
The  veriest  jade  will  wince  whose  harness  wrings 

So  much  into  the  raw  as  quite  to  wrong  her 
Beyond  the  rules  of  posting, — and  the  mob 
At  last  fall  sick  of  imitating  Job. 

"At  first  it  grumbles,  then  it  swears,  and  then. 

Like  David,  flings  smooth  pebbles  'gainst  a  giant; 

At  last  it  takes  to  weapons  such  as  men 

Snatch  when  despair  makes  human  hearts  less  pliant. 

Then  comes  the  'tug  of  war';  'twill  come  again 
I  rather  doubt;  and  I  would  fain  say  'fie  on't,' 

If  I  had  not  perceived  that  revolution 

Alone  can  save  the  earth  from  hell's  pollution. 

"And  I  will  war,  at  least  in  words  (and — should 
My  chance  so  happen — deeds)  with  all  who  war 

With  Thought; — and  of  Thought's  foes  by  far  most  rude 
Tyrants  and  sycophants  have  been  and  are. 

I  know  not  who  may  conquer;  if  I  could 
Have  such  a  prescience,  it  should  be  no  bar 

To  this  my  plain,  sworn,  downright  detestation 

Of  every  despotism  in  every  nation." 

It  must  not  be  forgotten,  as  the  fun  waxes  fast  and 
furious  in  this  satirical  epic,  that  a  current  of  seri- 
ous thought  flows  beneath  the  rippHng  surface,  and 
that  the  very  jests  of  the  poet  are  conceived  in  a 
spirit  of  deadly  earnestness.  The  society  of  Byron's 
own  time,  finding  its  hypocrisies  and  mean  vices  of 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      83 

every  description  so  mercilessly  scourged,  was  quick 
to  recognise  that  this  new  form  of  Byronism  was 
more  dangerous  than  the  earlier  one,  and  set  about 
discrediting  the  work  in  every  possible  way.  The 
contemporary  criticisms  of  the  poem  in  the  English 
reviews  offer  almost  unanimous  testimony  to  the 
effective  aim  of  its  satirical  shafts.  A  typically 
abusive  specimen  may  be  taken  from  The  British 
Critic : 

"Of  the  four  hundred  and  odd  stanzas  which  the  [first]  two 
Cantos  contain,  not  a  tittle  could,  even  in  the  utmost  latitude 
of  interpretation,  be  dignified  by  the  name  of  poetry.  It  has 
not  wit  enough  to  be  comic,  it  has  not  spirit  enough  to  be  lyric: 
nor  is  it  didactic  of  anything  but  mischief.  The  versification 
and  morality  are  about  upon  a  par;  as  far,  therefore,  as  we 
are  enabled  to  give  it  any  character  at  all,  we  should  pronounce 
it  a  narrative  of  degrading  debauchery  in  doggerel  rhyme.  Tlie 
style  which  the  noble  lord  has  adopted  is  tedious  and  weari- 
some to  a  most  insufi'erable  degree.  In  the  present  thick  and 
heavy  quarto,  containing  upwards  of  four  hundred  doggerel 
stanzas,  there  are  not  a  dozen  places  that,  even  in  the  merriest 
mood,  could  raise  a  smile." 

Whoever  wrote  this  opinion  was  evidently  hurt,  so 
much  hurt  that  he  does  not  seem  to  realise  how 
plainly  he  was  stating  the  fact.  Let  us  place  beside 
this  outcry  the  opinion  of  Goethe,  who  wrote: 

"When  we  examine  the  piece  more  narrowly,  we  feel  that 
English  poetry  is  in  possession  of  what  the  German  has  never 
attained,  a  classically  elegant  comic  style.  If  I  am  blamed  for 
recommending  this  work  for  translation — for  throwing  out 
hints  which  may  serve  to  introduce  so  immoral  a  performance 
among  a  quiet  and  uncorrupted  nation — I  answer,  that  I  really 


84      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

do  not  perceive  any  likelihood  of  our  virtue's  sustaining  serious 
damage  in  this  way:  Poets  and  Romancers,  bad  as  they  may  be, 
have  not  yet  learned  to  be  more  pernicious  than  the  daily 
newspapers  which  lie  on  every  table." 

One  is  tempted  to  add  that  they  are  at  the  present 
day  still  farther  from  having  learned  the  lesson  than 
they  were  in  Goethe's  time.  And  yet  our  poets  and 
romancers  have  gone  far.  Certainly,  as  Professor 
Trent  says,  "an  age  that  reads  without  abhorrence 
certain  chapters  in  'The  Manxman,'  in  'Jude  the 
Obscure,'  and  in  'Evelyn  Innes,'  cannot  with  con- 
sistency put  'Don  Juan'  beyond  the  pale."  And  for 
a  sympathetic  estimate  of  the  poem  we  may  turn 
to  the  same  writer  where  he  says :  "It  is  the  greatest 
of  humorous  epics,  couched  in  a  style  that  could  not 
be  changed  except  for  the  worse,  and  unique  in  its 
combination  of  wit,  humour,  and  satire  with  a  genu- 
ine and  rich  vein  of  romantic  and  descriptive  poetry." 
It  is,  in  the  opinion  of  this  critic, 

"the  single  sustained  work  of  poetic  imagination  produced 
in  nineteenth-century  England  that  keeps  a  level  flight,  the  only 
one  written  in  a  style  and  verse-form  as  absolutely  appropri- 
ated by  its  author  as  English  blank  verse  is  by  Milton,  the 
Latin  hexameter  by  Virgil,  and  the  Romantic  Alexandrine  by 
Victor  Hugo.  ...  It  is  the  single  long  poem  in  English  that 
grows  fresher  with  each  reading,  and  that  gives  the  sense  of 
being  in  the  presence  of  a  spirit  of  almost  boundless  capacity." 

The  history  of  public  opinion  concerning  Byron  is 
marked  by  sudden  changes  and  sharp  reactions.  The 
poet  who   is   overpraised   in  his  own   generation  is 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      85 

reasonably  sure  of  being  underpraised  in  the  next, 
but  there  are  few  poets  whose  fame  has  suffered  such 
vicissitudes  as  those  to  which  the  fame  of  Byron  has 
been  subject.  If  he  awoke  to  find  himself  famous 
the  morning  after  the  appearance  of  the  first  two 
cantos  of  "Childe  Harold,"  he  awoke  to  find  himself 
infamous  when,  some  three  years  later,  the  public 
learned  that  Lady  Byron  had  left  her  husband,  after 
a  little  more  than  a  year  of  wedded  life.  He  at  once 
became  the  victim  of  almost  every  form  of  defamation 
that  could  be  devised  by  ingenious  malignity,  and  the 
British  public  was  shaken  by  a  spasm  of  virtuous 
hypocrisy  which  was  unwilling  to  admit  that  there 
was  any  good  whatever  in  either  the  life  or  the  work 
of  a  poet  concerning  whom  such  stories  were  cir- 
culated. "He  was  compared,"  says  Professor  Nichol, 
"to  Sardanapalus,  Nero,  Tiberius,  the  Duke  of 
Orleans,  Heliogabalus,  and  Satan — all  the  most  dis- 
reputable persons  mentioned  in  sacred  and  profane 
history;  his  benevolences  were  maligned,  his  most 
disinterested  actions  perverted."  Small  wonder  that 
he  shook  from  his  feet  the  dust  of  a  country  that 
could  deal  with  him  in  such  fashion,  and  that  he  left 
England  in  1816,  never  to  return.  How  persistently 
he  was  pursued  by  the  voice  of  slander  throughout 
the  remaining  eight  years  of  his  life,  and  his  memory 
for  many  years  thereafter,  may  be  read  in  all  the 
histories  of  English  literature.  And  strangely 
enough,  as  Professor  Nichol  goes  on  to  say,  "it  is 
from  the  country  of  Washington,  whom  the  poet 


86      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

was  wont  to  reverence  as  the  purest  patriot  of  the 
modern  world,  that  in  1869  there  emanated  the  hide- 
ous story  which  scandalised  both  continents,  and  ulti- 
mately recoiled  on  the  retailer  of  the  scandal."  The 
abuse  which  Byron  drew  upon  himself  by  his  reckless- 
ness of  public  opinion,  and  by  the  irregularities  of  his 
life  both  in  England  and  abroad,  could  not  fail  to 
impair  his  fame  as  a  poet  among  his  fellow-country- 
men. The  brief  period  of  his  early  vogue  was  suc- 
ceeded by  a  long  term  of  years  during  which  criti- 
cism found  much  to  say  in  his  dispraise,  and  did  its 
best  to  ignore  his  real  services  to  English  poetry. 
European  critics  in  general  observed  this  revulsion 
of  feeling  with  amazement,  and  accounted  for  it  as 
a  manifestation  of  British  cant,  of  the  social  hypoc- 
risy which  was  almost  universally  believed  to  be  the 
most  marked  of  national  characteristics.  And  so, 
as  Byron's  fame  waned  at  home  it  waxed  abroad, 
and  came  to  assume  colossal  dimensions.  There  was 
something  of  truth,  no  doubt,  in  this  Continental 
theory  of  the  causes  which  led  to  the  rejection  of 
Byron  by  his  own  people.  During  the  eight  years 
of  his  self-imposed  exile,  his  work  was  constantly 
gaining  in  depth  and  artistic  value,  but  the  English 
public  refused  to  accord  it  a  reception  in  any  way 
proportional  to  its  merits.  That  public  had  gone 
into  ecstasies  over  the  sentimental  first  part  of 
"Childe  Harold,"  but  refused  to  be  stirred  to  any- 
thing like  the  same  degree  by  the  genuine  and  noble 
passion  of  the  second  part.     It  was  really  impossible 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      87 

to  approve  of  the  poet  whose  hfe  in  Venice  was  so 
scandalous,  and  who  flouted  with  such  contempt  the 
conventions  of  Enghsh  respectability.  But  this  ex- 
planation of  the  reaction  against  Byron,  although 
the  only  one  to  which  Continental  critics  have  ever 
been  willing  to  listen,  is  altogether  inadequate.  It 
accounts  in  part  only  for  the  rejection  of  Byron  by 
his  own  generation,  and  it  accounts  hardly  at  all  for 
the  fact  that  the  succeeding  generation  cared  even 
less  for  him  than  his  own.  The  real  explanation  is 
a  very  different  one.  During  the  years  that  elapsed 
between  the  death  of  Byron  and  the  death  of  Words- 
worth, that  portion  of  the  English  public  possessed 
of  sufficient  intelligence  to  make  its  opinion  worth 
considering  was  undergoing  such  an  education  in 
poetry  as  has  rarely  fallen  to  the  share  of  any  mod- 
ern people.  Keats  and  Shelley  were  coming  to  their 
own;  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth  were  winning  their 
way  to  that  critical  acceptance  which  is  based  upon 
the  permanent  principles  of  aesthetics  rather  than 
upon  the  passing  mood  of  an  age;  and  the  star  of 
Tennyson  was  burning  bright  far  above  the  horizon. 
Readers  of  nice  discernment  found  in  these  poets 
qualities  for  which  they  might  search  Byron  in  vain, 
and  fine  art  once  more  triumphed  over  the  crude  ex- 
pression of  passion.  It  was  simply  impossible  for  a 
generation  that  had  learned  to  appreciate  Tenny- 
son to 

"Recapture 
That  first,  fine,  careless  rapture" 


88      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

of  the  generation  that  had  been  stirred  by  Byron. 
German  and  French  critics  have  never  understood 
this,  because,  at  least  until  very  recent  years,  they 
have  never  known  how  to  value  the  finer  qualities  of 
modern  English  poetry.  The  art  of  Tennyson  abso- 
lutely defies  translation  into  the  terms  of  any  other 
idiom  than  the  English,  a  statement  which  may  be 
made  with  confidence  in  spite  of  such  an  occasional 
tour  de  force  as  Freiligrath's  version  of  "The  splen- 
dour falls  on  castle  walls."  The  reaction  against 
Byron  in  English  criticism  is,  on  the  whole,  justified 
by  the  development  of  English  poetry  since  his  day. 
Making  all  allowances  for  the  unworthy  motives 
which  were  associated  with  that  reaction  when  it 
first  became  declared,  and  resting  our  judgment 
solely  upon  such  considerations  as  are  legitimate  in 
literary  criticism,  it  seems  safe  to  say  that  B^^ron 
can  never  again  be  ranked  where  he  was  ranked  by 
his  contemporaries,  and  that  the  final  pronouncement 
concerning  him  will  take  substantially  the  shape 
given  it  by  Mr.  Swinburne:  "As  a  poet,  Byron  was 
surpassed,  beyond  all  question  and  all  comparison,  by 
three  men  at  least  of  his  own  time,  and  matched,  if 
not  now  and  then  overmatched,  by  one  or  two  others." 
This  judgment  has  been  expressed  by  so  many  critics 
of  the  last  thirty  or  forty  years  that  such  occa- 
sional voices  as  those  of  Arnold  and  Henley,  in  our 
own  time  raised  in  his  behalf,  are  heard  as  if  crying 
in  the  wilderness,  and  are  not  likely  to  reverse  the 
general  verdict. 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      89 

As  far  as  the  form  and  spirit  of  Byron's  poetry  are 
concerned,  the  words  of  Mr.  John  Morley,  whose 
natural  sympathies  would  incline  him  toward  the 
most  favourable  view,  may  be  taken  to  indicate  the 
modern  feeling  for  Byron  as  a  poet.  The  work  of 
Shelley  is  the  touchstone  by  which  Mr.  Morley  tests 
the  work  of  Byron,  and  the  comparison  is  in  these 
words : 

"That  Shelley  was  immeasurably  superior  to  Byron  in  all  the 
rarer  qualities  of  the  specially  poetic  mind  appears  to  us  so 
unmistakably  assured  a  fact,  that  difference  of  opinion  upon 
it  can  only  spring  from  a  more  fundamental  difference  of 
opinion  as  to  what  it  is  that  constitutes  this  specially  poetic 
quality.  If  more  than  anything  else  it  consists  in  the  power 
of  transfiguring  action,  character,  and  thought,  in  the  serene 
radiance  of  the  purest  imaginative  intelligence,  and  the  gift 
of  expressing  these  transformed  products  in  the  finest  articulate 
vibrations  of  emotional  speech,  then  must  we  not  confess  that 
Byron  has  composed  no  piece  which  from  this  point  may  com- 
pare with  'Prometheus'  or  the  'Cenci,'  any  more  than  Rubens  may 
take  his  place  with  Raphael?  We  feel  that  Shelley  transports 
the  spirit  to  the  highest  bound  and  limit  of  the  intelligible; 
and  that  with  him  thought  passes  through  one  superadded  and 
more  rarefying  process  than  the  other  poet  is  master  of.  If 
it  be  true,  as  has  been  written,  that  'Poetry  is  the  breath  and 
finer  spirit  of  all  knowledge,'  we  may  say  that  Shelley  teaches 
us  to  apprehend  that  further  something,  the  breath  and  finer 
spirit  of  poetry  itself.  Contrasting,  for  example,  Shelley's 
'Ode  to  the  West  Wind,'  with  the  famous  and  truly  noble 
stanzas  on  the  eternal  sea  which  closed  the  fourth  canto  of 
'Childe  Harold,'  who  does  not  feel  that  there  is  in  the  first  a 
volatile  and  unseizable  element  that  is  quite  distinct  from 
the  imagination  and  force  and  high  impressiveness,  or  from 
any  indefinable  product  of  all  of  these  united,  which  form  the 
glory  and  power  of  the  second?  We  may  ask  in  the  same 
way  whether  'Manfred,'  v/here  the  spiritual  element  is  as  pre- 


90      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

dominant  as  it  ever  is  in  Byron,  is  worth  half  a  page  of 
Trometheus.' " 

Concerning  the  substance  of  Byron's  poetry,  Arnold 
makes  this  criticism: 

"Byron  threw  himself  upon  poetry  as  his  organ;  and  in 
poetry  his  topics  were  not  Queen  ;Mab,  and  the  Witch  of  Atlas, 
and  the  Sensitive  Plant,  they  were  the  upholders  of  the  old 
order,  George  the  Third,  and  Lord  Castlereagh,  and  the  Duke 
of  Wellington,  and  Southey,  and  they  were  the  canters  and 
tramplers  of  the  great  world,  and  they  were  his  enemies  and 
himself." 

Upon  which,  Mr.  Swinburne  delivers  himself  of  the 
following  caustic  but  not  unfair  judgment: 

"If  I  wanted  an  instance  of  provincial  and  barbarian  criticism, 
of  criticism  inspired  by  a  spirit  of  sour  unreasonableness,  a 
spirit  of  bitterness  and  darkness,  I  should  certainly  never 
dream  of  seeking  further  than  this  sentence  for  the  illustration 
required.  It  is  almost  too  contemptibly  easy  to  retort  in  kind 
by  observing  that  when  Shelley  threw  himself  upon  poetry  as 
his  organ,  his  topics  were  not  Hours  of  Idleness,  and  Hints 
from  Horace,  and  the  Waltz,  they  were  the  redemption  of  the 
world  by  the  martyrdom  of  righteousness,  and  the  regeneration 
of  man  through  'Gentleness,  Virtue,  Wisdom,  and  Endurance,' 
and  they  were  the  heroism  of  Beatrice  and  the  ascension  of 
Adonais,  and  they  were  the  resurrection  of  Italy  and  of  Greece, 
and  they  were  the  divinest  things  of  nature,  made  more  divine 
through  the  interpretation  of  love  infallible  and  the  mastery  of 
insuperable  song." 

The  subject  of  Byron's  life  and  character  is  one 
with  which  we  are  here  less  concerned  than  with  his 
poetry,  but  one  which  may  not  be  altogether  neglected 
in  view  of  the  fact  that  what  he  wrote  stood  in  unusu- 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      91 

ally  close  relations  to  what  he  was  and  what  he  did. 
Symonds  has  written  of  the  various  contradictions 
of  his  nature  in  these  words,  which  seem  to  pene- 
trate to  the  root  of  the  matter : 

"The  ostentation  which  repels  us  in  Byron's  correspondence 
and  in  the  records  left  of  him  by  his  associates,  the  swaggering 
tone  that  spoils  so  much  of  his  best  work  and  makes  it  im- 
possible to  love  the  man  as  we  should  like  to  do,  may  be 
ascribed  to  a  habit  early  acquired  of  self-sophistication.  He 
veneered  the  true  and  noble  self  which  gave  life  to  his  poetry 
with  a  layer  of  imperfectly  comprehended  cynicism  and  weak 
misanthropy,  that  passed  with  him  for  worldly  wisdom.  There 
are  two  distinct  Byrons,  interpenetrative,  blended  in  his  life 
and  work.  To  disentangle  them  is  wellnigh  impossible;  for 
he  cherished  his  inferior  self,  and  mistook  its  weakness  and  its 
falsehood  for  strength  and  sincerity  of  insight." 

We  are  compelled,  then,  to  defend  Byron  against 
himself  if  we  wish  to  deal  fairly  with  him.  It  is 
easy  to  be  cheaply  virtuous,  and  to  denounce  the 
specific  failings  of  a  man ;  it  is  far  less  easy  to  view 
his  character  from  within,  and  to  interpret  his 
actions  with  full  sympathy  and  understanding.  The 
last  episode  in  Byron's  life,  his  devotion  to  the  cause 
of  Greek  independence,  and  the  ungrudging  gift  of 
all  his  resources  and  all  his  powers  to  the  furtherance 
of  this  high  impersonal  aim,  goes  far  to  atone  for 
much  that  we  could  wish  to  have  been  otherwise  in 
the  rest  of  his  life.  Upon  those  closing  months,  at 
least,  there  is  no  stain,  but  there  is  set  instead  the 
seal  of  unselfish  heroic  endeavour.  We  may  surely 
be  as  generous  to  his  memory  as  Landor  was,  who 


92      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

had  been  lampooned  by  Bjron,  and  had  joined  in 
the  outcry  against  him.  To  the  "Imaginary  Conver- 
sation" in  which  Landor  had  described  Byron  as  a 
profligate,  and  reviewed  his  faults  with  biting  sar- 
casm, he  afterwards  added  a  note  containing  this 
language : 

"If,  before  the  dialogue  was  printed,  he  had  performed  those 
services  to  Greece  which  will  render  his  name  illustrious  to 
eternity,  those  by  which  he  merited  such  funereal  honours  as, 
in  the  parsimony  of  praise,  knowing  its  value  in  republics,  she 
hardly  would  have  decreed  to  the  most  deserving  of  her  heroes, 
if,  I  repeat  it,  he  had  performed  those  services,  the  performance 
of  which  I  envy  him  from  my  soul,  and  as  much  as  any  other 
does  the  gifts  of  heaven  he  threw  away  so  carelessly,  never 
would  I,  from  whatever  provocation,  have  written  a  syllabic 
against  him.  I  had  avoided  him;  I  had  slighted  him;  he  knew 
it:  he  did  not  love  me;  he  could  not.  ...  I  do  not  talk  of 
weeping  or  bewailing  or  lamenting,  for  I  hate  false  words,  and 
seek  with  care,  difficulty,  and  moroseness,  those  that  fit  the 
thing — why  then  should  I  dissemble  that,  if  I  have  shed  no 
tears,  they  are  at  this  moment  in  my  eyes!  O  that  I  could 
have  clasped  his  hand  before  he  died!  only  to  make  him  more 
enamoured  of  his  own  virtues  and  to  keep  him  with  them 
always !" 

The  spirit  in  which  Byron  entered  upon  his  mission 
as  an  auxiliary  in  the  liberation  of  Greece,  may  be 
illustrated  by  a  passage  from  his  journal,  in  which 
he  writes: 

"Onwards!  it  is  now  the  time  to  act;  and  what  signifies  self, 
if  a  single  spark  of  that  which  would  be  worthy  of  the  past 
can  be  bequeathed  unquenchably  to  the  future?  It  is  not  one 
man,  nor  a  million,  but  the  spirit  of  liberty  which  must  be 
spread.    The  waves  which  dash  on  the  shore  are,  one  by  one, 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      93 

broken;  but  yet  the  ocean  conquers  nevertheless.  It  over- 
whelms the  armada;  it  wears  the  rock;  and  if  the  Neptunians 
are  to  be  believed,  it  has  not  only  destroyed  but  made  a  worldV* 

This,  says  Mazzini,  "is  the  very  abstract  of  the  law 
governing  the  efforts  of  the  true  party  of  progress 
at  the  present  day."  And  when  Byron  had  once  em- 
barked upon  this  final  venture,  all  that  was  visionary 
about  him  seemed  to  vanish.  The  poet  of  reverie  gave 
place  to  the  man  of  action.  The  hard  practical  sense 
that  had  always  been  an  underlying  element  in  his 
nature  now  dominated  his  thought,  and  he  planned 
his  expedition  with  all  the  cool  calculation  of  an  old 
campaigner.  He  had  at  last  found  something  to  do, 
something  in  which  he  believed  with  his  whole  heart, 
and  to  do  it  he  gathered  together  all  the  energy 
that  was  left  him.  Even  the  weight  of  the  world- 
weariness,  that  had  long  been  upon  him,  seemed 
lightened,  and,  although  the  Byronic  note  is  not  miss- 
ing from  his  verses  and  journals  during  the  last  few 
months  of  his  life,  it  has  lost  something  of  its  lan- 
guor, and  no  longer  seems  to  claim  sympathy  for  the 
personal  woes  of  the  poet  alone.  In  reading  of  these 
last  few  weeks  of  his  life,  we  are  impressed  with  the 
sanity  and  strength  of  his  purpose,  and  smile  at 
Carlyle's  description  of  the  "sham  strong  man"  who 
"fights  little  for  any  good  cause  anywhere."  A 
responsive  echo  is  struck  within  us,  not  by  such  carp- 
ings  as  those  of  Carlyle,  but  rather  by  the  eloquent 
words  with  which  Mr.  Swinburne  closes  the  earlier 
and  the  more  temperate  of  his  two  essays  on  Byron : 


94      GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON 

"As  it  is,  his  work  was  done  at  Missolonghi;  all  of  his  work 
for  which  the  fates  could  spare  him  time.  A  little  space  was 
allowed  him  to  show  at  least  a  heroic  purpose,  and  attest  a 
high  design:  then,  with  all  things  unfinished  before  him  and 
behind,  he  fell  asleep  after  many  troubles  and  triumphs.  Few 
can  ever  have  gone  wearier  to  the  grave;  none  with  less  fear. 
He  had  done  enough  to  earn  his  rest.  Forgetful  now  and  set 
free  forever  from  all  faults  and  foes,  he  passed  through  the 
doorway  of  no  ignoble  death  out  of  reach  of  time,  out  of  sight 
of  love,  out  of  hearing  of  hatred,  beyond  the  blame  of  England 
and  the  praise  of  Greece,  In  the  full  strength  of  spirit  and 
of  body  his  destiny  overtook  him  and  made  an  end  of  all  his 
labours.  He  had  seen  and  borne  and  achieved  more  than  most 
men  on  record.  'He  was  a  great  man,  good  at  many  things, 
and  now  he  has  attained  this  also — to  be  at  rest.' " 

Many  a  poet  writes  his  own  best  epitaph,  and  Byron 
has  furnished  more  fitting  words  for  this  purpose 
than  another  would  be  Hkely  to  provide.  Professor 
Dowden  suggests  these  lines  from  "Manfred" : 

"This  should  have  been  a  noble  creature;  he 
Hath  all  the  energy  which  would  have  made 
A  goodly  frame  of  glorious  elements. 
Had  they  been  wisely  mingled;  as  it  is 
It  is  an  awful  chaos — light  and  darkness, 
And  mind  and  dust,  and  passions  and  pure  thoughts 
Mix'd,  and  contending  without  end  or  order." 

But  even  more  fitting  than  these  words,  in  view  of 
the  cause  for  which  Byron  gave  his  life,  are  those 
of  Israel  Bertuccio  in  "Marino  Faliero" : 

"They  never  fail  who  die 
In  a  great  cause;  the  block  may  soak  their  gore; 
Their  heads  may  sodden  in  the  sun;  their  limbs 
Be  strung  to  city  gates  and  castle  walls^ 


GEORGE  GORDON  BYRON      95 

But  still  their  spirit  walks  abroad.     Though  years 
Elapse,  and  others  share  as  dark  a  doom, 
They  but  augment  the  deep  and  sweeping  thoughts 
Which  overpower  all  others,  and  conduct 
The  world  at  last  to  freedom." 

Let   our  final  memory   of   Byron   remain,  then,  the  / 
memory  of  those  "deep  and  sweeping  thoughts"  which; 
flowed  from  his  personality  into  the  intellectual  cur-l 
rent    of    the    nineteenth    century,    and    moved    the\ 
European  world  as  it  had  never  before  been  moved  * 
by  any  English  poet. 


Samuel  ^a^lor  Colcrtt)Qe 

In  discussing  the  English  poets  of  the  first  half 
of  the  century,  it  has  seemed  best,  on  the  whole,  to 
take  them  up  in  the  order  suggested  by  the  dates 
of  their  death  rather  than  of  their  birth.  In  the 
cases  of  all  except  Landor,  this  order  of  treatment 
has  the  disadvantage  of  taking  us  further  back  into 
the  eighteenth  century  with  each  of  the  poets  con- 
sidered, although  each  of  them  at  the  same  time 
carries  us  further  on  into  the  nineteenth  century. 
When  we  set  the  dates  of  the  five  poets  side  by  side 
for  purposes  of  comparison,  the  interesting  fact 
appears  that  the  youngest  born  of  them  was  the  first 
to  die,  and  that,  taken  in  this  order,  each  poet's  span 
of  life  overlaps  at  both  ends  that  of  the  one  previ- 
ously considered.  Thus  the  eighty  years  of  Words- 
worth embrace  the  sixty-two  of  Coleridge,  the  sixty- 
two  of  Coleridge  embrace  the  thirty-six  of  Byron, 
the  thirty-six  of  Byron  embrace  the  thirty  of  Shelley, 
and  the  thirty  of  Shelley  embrace  the  twenty-six  of 
Keats.  This  singular  "telescoping"  of  the  respective 
periods  fails  only  when  we  come  to  Landor,  who  was 
five  years  the  junor  of  Wordsworth,  and  who  out- 
lived him  by  fourteen.  Since  the  attitude  of  these 
poets  toward  the  revolutionary  movement  in  politics, 

96 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  97 

the  rationalising  movement  in  thought,  and  the  ro- 
mantic movement  in  Hterature,  is  the  chief  subject  of 
the  present  chapters,  we  are  compelled  to  work  back- 
ward as  well  as  forward  in  summing  up  their  relations 
to  this  threefold  development.  With  Byron,  Shelley, 
and  Keats,  whom  we  have  already  considered,  this 
makes  very  little  difference,  for  they  were  nearly 
enough  of  the  same  age  to  be  for  all  practical  pur- 
poses contemporaries.  They  all  reached  manhood 
when  the  Revolution  had  become  a  memory,  when  the 
reactionary  spirit  had  seemed  to  triumph,  and  it 
was  their  function,  or  at  least  the  function  of  two 
of  them,  to  revive  the  fading  embers,  and  to  prove 
that  the  Revolution  in  its  wider  meaning  had  only 
just  begun.  With  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth,  to 
whom  attention  is  next  invited,  the  case  is  different. 
Coleridge  was  seventeen  and  Wordsworth  was  nine- 
teen when  the  Day  of  the  Republic  dawned  for 
France,  and  inaugurated  the  new  era  of  European 
thought.  In  other  words,  they  were  at  precisely  the 
most  impressionable  age  when  the  stirring  events  of 
1789  made  their  appeal  to  all  ardent  spirits  through- 
out the  world,  vitalising  the  thought  and  action  of  a 
generation  that  had  seemed  to  be  sunk  in  sluggish- 
ness. Just  then  Coleridge  was  still  a  "charity  boy" 
at  Christ's  Hospital.  He  went  to  Cambridge  two 
years  later,  and,  although  our  knowledge  of  his 
university  career  is  meagre,  it  includes  abundant  evi- 
dence that  he  was  in  hearty  sympathy  with  the 
revolutionary   movement.      One   of   his   friends   tells 


98  SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

us  that  the  rooms  of  Coleridge,  at  that  time,  were  a 
sort  of  hotbed  of  radical  discussion,  and  were 
"crowded  by  friends  who  came  to  hear  their  host 
declaim,  and  repeat  'whole  passages  verbatim'  from 
the  political  pamphlets  which  then  swarmed  from  the 
press."  He  had  already  celebrated  the  fall  of  the 
Bastile  in  a  boyish  ode  which  declared : 

"I  see,  I  see !  glad  Liberty  succeed 

With  every  patriot  virtue  in  her  train! 
And  mark  yon  peasant's  raptured  eyes; 
Secure  he  \-iews  his  harvests  rise; 
No  fetter  vile  the  mind  shall  know. 
And  Eloquence  shall  fearless  gldw. 
Yes !  Liberty  the  soul  of  Life  shall  reign, 
Shall  throb  in  every  pulse,  shall  flow  thro'  every  vein  !'* 

Three  j^ears  later,  in  some  lines  addressed  "To  a 
Young  Lady,"  he  described  the  feelings  which  had 
been  aroused  in  him  when  "slumbering  freedom"  on 
that  great  day  "with  giant  fury  burst  her  triple 
chain." 

"Fierce  on  her  front  the  blasting  Dog-star  glowed; 
Her  banners,  like  a  midnight  meteor,  flowed; 
Amid  the  yelling  of  the  storm-rent  skies! 
She  came,  and  scattered  battles  from  her  eyes! 
Then  Exultation  waked  the  patriot  fire 
And  swept  with  wilder  hand  the  Alcaean  lyre: 
Red  from  the  Tyrant's  wound  I  shook  the  lance, 
And  strode  in  joy  the  reeking  plains  of  France!" 

In  the  autumn  of  1794,  he  joined  with  Southey  in 
writing  the  three-act  drama,  "The  Fall  of  Robes- 
pierre," attempting,  in  his  own  words,  "to  imitate 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  99 

the  empassioned  and  highly  figurative  language  of 
the  French  orators,  and  to  develop  the  characters 
of  the  chief  actors  on  a  vast  stage  of  horrors."  It  is 
a  performance  of  no  particular  value,  but  interesting 
as  an  index  to  the  state  of  the  poet's  mind  at  that 
time.  A  few  months  later,  he  contributed  to  The 
Morning  Chronicle  those  "Sonnets  on  Eminent  Char- 
acters," which  Brandl  calls  "the  most  burning  and  di- 
rect effusions  of  anger  that  the  Enghsh  lyrical  school 
of  the  eighteenth  century  ever  poured  forth."  Among 
the  subjects  of  these  sonnets  were  Burke,  Priestley, 
Pitt,  Godwin,  Southey,  Lafayette,  and  Kosciusko. 
Burke,  for  example,  is  thus  apostrophised  by  the  per- 
sonified spirit  of  freedom: 

"Great  Son  of  Genius !  sweet  to  me  thy  name, 
Ere  in  an  evil  hour  with  altered  voice 
Thou  badst  Oppression's  hireling  crew  rejoice 
Blasting  with  wizard  spell  my  laurelled  fame.'* 

When  Coleridge  wrote  these  lines  he  little  realised 
that  the  irony  of  fate  would  within  a  few  years  make 
them  fairly  applicable  to  himself.  Nor  in  describing 
Pitt  as  a  "foul  apostate  from  his  Father's  fame," 
could  he  foresee  that  he  would  himself  soon  deserve  the 
ascription  of  apostasy.  It  would  be  interesting  for 
us  to  know  more  fully  than  is  now  possible  the 
reasons  why  the  revolutionary  ardour  of  Coleridge 
became  so  quickly  cooled.  How  it  was  that  the  en- 
thusiastic champion  of  the  French  in  their  struggle 
for  freedom  so  soon  relapsed  into  the  complacent 


100       SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

English  Tory,  or  something  like  that,  distrustful 
of  all  subversions  and  popular  movements,  it  is  diffi- 
cult to  comprehend.  We  know  that  this  change  of 
feeling  occurred  in  him,  in  common  with  Wordsworth 
and  Southey,  and  even  more  rapidly  than  with  them. 
It  is  true  that  the  French  struggle  for  freedom  was 
about  to  be  transformed  into  a  mad  struggle  for 
dominion  over  the  rest  of  Europe,  and  that  the  im- 
pending military  despotism  of  Napoleon  was  in  a 
way  foreshadowed  even  before  the  expedition  to 
Egypt.  The  disillusionment  of  this  prospect  was  a 
sad  blow  to  the  hopes  of  all  lovers  of  liberty  in  Eng- 
land and  elsewhere,  but  it  need  not  have  led  to  that 
condemnation  of  the  Revolution  and  all  its  ways 
which  finds  expression  in  the  later  work  of  Coleridge 
and  Wordsworth.  We  know  that  the  excesses  of  the 
Revolution  and  the  abandonment  of  the  early  ideal 
of  freedom  for  France  in  favour  of  the  later  ideal 
of  subjugation  for  the  rest  of  Europe,  created  a 
feeling  of  distrust  and  horror  in  many  men  of  noble 
impulses  but  contracted  vision.  We  can  understand 
the  effect  of  these  things  upon  the  mind  of  Southey, 
and  even  upon  the  mind  of  Wordsworth,  but  upon 
the  mind  of  Coleridge,  distinguished  for  analytical 
power  and  prophetic  insight,  we  cannot  so  easily 
understand  it.  The  faith  of  Landor  in  the  principles 
of  the  Revolution  remained  firm  to  the  end,  but  the 
faith  of  Coleridge  could  not  bear  the  strain  put  upon 
it  by  the  events  of  the  hour.  His  change  of  attitude 
is  indissolubly  associated  with  the  two  "Odes"  which 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        101 

are  among  the  greater  glories  of  all  English  poetry. 
The  "Ode  on  the  Departing  Year"  was  written  in 
December,  1796,  the  "France"  in  February,  1798. 
Who  can  ever  forget  the  magnificent  music  with 
which  the  first  of  these  odes  begins? 

"Spirit  who  sweepest  the  wild  Harp  of  Time! 

It  is  most  hard,  with  an  untroubled  ear 

Thy  dark  inwoven  harmonies  to  hear! 
Yet,  mine  eye  fixed  on  Heaven's  unchanging  clime 
Long  had  I  listened,  free  from  mortal  fear. 

With  inward  stillness,  and  submitted  mind; 

When  lo  I  its  folds  far  waving  on  the  wind, 
I  saw  the  train  of  the  Departing  Year!" 

In  this  ode  the  poet's  love  for  his  own  country  strug- 
gles with  his  sense  of  her  guilt.  The  spirit  of  Liberty 
is  abroad,  and  England  still  clings  to  the  gods  of 
avarice  and  materiahsm.  Her  crimes  call  for  atone- 
ment, yet  the  poet  believes  her  "not  yet  enslaved,  not 
wholly  vile."  He  fears  for  her,  yet  is  not  altogether 
without  hope.  Meanwhile,  the  increasing  dangers 
to  which  she  is  subject,  both  from  her  own  vices  and 
from  the  menace  of  French  invasion,  are  instinctively 
arousing  the  poet's  latent  patriotism,  and  preparing 
him  for  the  second  of  the  great  odes.  The  encroach- 
ment of  the  French  forces  upon  the  hitherto  inviolate 
soil  of  the  Swiss  Cantons  was  the  immediate  cause  of 
this  second  ode,  which  is  sometimes  called  the  "Recan- 
tation," and  which  marks  the  turning  point  in  the 
development  of  Coleridge's  ideals.  All  lovers  of 
poetry  know  these  magnificent  lines,  which  invoke  the 


102       SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

forests  and  the  seas,  the  skies  and  the  sun,  to  bear 
witness  with  what  deep  worship  the  poet  has  ever 
adored  "the  spirit  of  divinest  Liberty." 

"When  France  in  wrath  her  giant-limbs  upreared, 

And  with  that  oath,  which  smote  air,  earth,  and  sea, 

Stamped  her  strong  foot  and  said  she  would  be  free. 
Bear  witness  for  me,  how  I  hoped  and  feared! 
With  what  a  joy  my  lofty  gratulation 

Unawed  I  sang,  amid  a  slavish  band: 
And  when  to  whelm  the  disenchanted  nation. 

Like  fiends  embattled  by  a  wizard's  wand. 
The  Monarchs  marched  in  evil  day. 
And  Britain  join'd  the  dire  array; 

Though  dear  her  shores  and  circling  ocean. 
Though  many  friendships,  many  youthful  loves 

Had  swoln  the  patriot  emotion 
And  flung  a  magic  light  o'er  all  her  hills  and  groves; 
Yet  still  my  voice,  unaltered,  sang  defeat 

To  all  that  braved  the  tyrant-quelling  lance. 
And  shame  too  long  delay'd  and  vain  retreat ! 
For  ne'er,  O  Liberty!  with  partial  aim 
I  dimmed  thy  light  or  damped  thy  holy  flame; 

But  blessed  the  paeans  of  delivered  France, 
And  hung  my  head  and  wept  at  Britain's  name." 


Even  when  "Blasphemy's  loud  scream"  had  brought 
discord  into  the  "sweet  music  of  deliverance,"  even 
when  storms  "round  the  dawning  east  as"^  eaibled," 
he  did  not  falter,  but  only  "reproached  the  'fears  that 
would  not  flee."  But  the  attack  upon  Switzerland 
brought  about  a  revulsion  of  feeling;  he  discovered 
that  he  had  been  tricked,  deluded  by  false  promises 
and  spurious  professions  of  a  lofty  purpose. 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        103 

"O  France,  that  mockest  Heaven,  adulterous,  blind. 

And  patriot  only  in  pernicious  toils! 
Are  these  thy  boasts.  Champion  of  human  kind? 

To  mix  with  Kings  in  the  low  lust  of  sway. 
Yell  in  the  hunt,  and  share  the  murderous  prey; 
To  insult  the  shrine  of  Liberty  with  spoils 

From  freemen  torn;  to  tempt  and  to  betray?" 

His  hopes  thus  frustrated,  he  takes  refuge  in  an 
abstract  and  metaphysical  conception  of  freedom, 
and  turns  to  nature,  somewhat  as  Byron  did,  to  find 
iiTher  an  anodyne  for  grief . 

"The  Sensual  and  the  Dark  rebel  in  vain. 

Slaves  by  their  own  compulsion !     In  mad  game 

They  burst  their  manacles  and  wear  the  name 

Of  Freedom  graven  on  a  heavier  chain !" 

The  true  spirit  of  freedom  is  that  of  the  winds  and 
the  waves,  and  in  communion  with  them  the  soul  finds 
the  peace  which  it  has  sought  in  vain  amid  the 
turmoil  of  human  strife. 

"And  there  I  felt  thee! — on  that  sea-cliif's  verge. 
Whose  pines,  scarce  travelled  by  the  breeze  above, 
Had  made  one  murmur  with  the  distant  surge! 
Yes,  while  I  stood  and  gazed,  my  temples  bare. 
And  shot  my  being  through  earth,  sea  and  air. 
Possessing  all  things  with  intensest  love, 
O  Liberty!  my  spirit  felt  thee  there." 

"Such  a  doctrine  approaches  hazardously  near  to 
political  despair,"  says  Professor  Dowden,  who  thus 
summarises  the  final  conclusion  of  the  poet : 

"The  idea  of  God  possessed  him;  he  seemed  to  feel  the  Divine 
Presence  as  a  breeze,  plastic  and  vast,  which  plays  over  and 


104        SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

through  the  whole  of  animated  nature  like  the  wind  amid  the 
chords  of  an  ^olian  harp.  True  freedom  was  to  be  found  in 
communion  and  co-operancy  with  this  universal  Deity  ;^  chain 
down  one's  thoughts  in  false  philosophy  to  the  gross  and  visible' 
sphere, — that  indeed  was  slavery.  Through  the  fierce  strife 
between  the  powers  of  chaos  and  the  powers  of  order  which 
fills  the  world  there  is  yet  discernible  to  the  eye  of  faith  an 
eternal  process  of  good.  In  this  religious  optimism,  this  belief 
of  a  divine  evolution  of  society,  unhastingriinresting,  lay  in 
embryo  the  future  conservatism  of  Coleridge." 

In  his  later  view,  the  one  palpable  product  of  the 
Revolution  had  become  that  reckless  ambition  which, 
incarnate  in  Napoleon,  sought  to  destroy  for  the  rest 
of  Europe  the  very  liberties  which  France  had  so 
strenuously  asserted  for  herself.  And  when,  with 
the  immediate  danger  to  England  that  came  with  the 
French  forces  gathered  at  Boulogne  for  their  con- 
templated expedition  across  the  Channel,  "a  second 
springtime  of  enthusiasm"  came  for  the  English  peo- 
ple, the  enthusiasm  was  for  a  national  rather  than 
for  a  cosmopolitan  ideal.  Coleridge  and  Words- 
worth and  Southey  became  ardent  nationahsts.  This 
new  attitude  of  Coleridge  finds  expression  in  his  verse, 
which  declares 

"There  lives  nor  form  nor  feeling  in  my  soul 
Unborrowed  from  my  country," 

and  in  the  "Biographia  Literaria,"  in  which  French 
ideas  and  French  influences  are  denounced  with  the 
utmost  vehemence.  In  his  later  prose  writings,  par- 
ticularly in  "The  Friend,"  he  seeks  to  justify  his 
change  of  attitude  by  pointing  out  the  fallacies  of 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        105 

Rousseau  and  his  followers,  and  characterising 
French  philosophy  in  general  as  sensual  and 
ajtheistic. 

It  seems  to  be  desirable  at  this  point  of  the  dis- 
cussion to  pause  for  an  inquiry  into  the  meaning  of 
freedom  as  the  concept  was  held  by  Coleridge,  by 
his  contemporaries  and  his  successors.  With  the 
purely  metaphysical  conception  of  individual  free- 
dom we  are  not  now  concerned.  But  of  freedom  in 
the  sense  in  which  the  term  was  commonly  used  by 
Coleridge  and  Wordsworth,  by  Shelley  and  Byron, 
there  are  some  important  things  to  say,  and  an  im- 
portant distinction  to  be  drawn.  Freedom  may  be 
either  external  or  internal,  and  the  ideal  of  the  latter 
is  very  different  l^-om  the  ideal  of  the  former,  al- 
though to  a  certain  extent  conditioned  by  it.  Goethe, 
with  that  marvellous  insight  into  the  spiritual  life  of 
his  own  and  the  coming  generations  which  made  him 
the  chief  voice  of  the  nineteenth  century,  declared  that 
his  best  gift  to  mankind  was  the  gift  of  a  certain  inner 
freedom  which  is  the  most  precious  of  all  intellectual 
possessions.  This  freedom  of  the  spirit  was  to  him 
a  far  more  important  thing  than  the  political  free- 
dom for  which  so  much  clamour  was  made  about  him, 
and  he  remained  serenely  unmoved  by  all  the  re- 
proaches of  those  who  censured  him  for  a  lack  of 
the  narrower  sort  of  patriotic  fervour.  Conscious 
that  he  was  working  for  a  larger  emancipation  than 
was  aimed  at  by  the  revolutionary  forces  of  his  time, 
he  bore  the  burden  of  unjust  reproach,  and  his  enor- 


106       SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

mous  influence  upon  the  century  recently  ended,  has 
justified  an  attitude  toward  the  problems  of  his  own 
time  which  to  his  contemporaries  seemed  too  unsym- 
pathetic and  Olympian.  Of  the  group  of  English 
poets  with  which  we  are  now  dealing,  Goethe  thought 
Byron  much  the  greatest,  because  he  discovered  in 
that  forceful  personality  an  aspiration  toward  the 
wider  spiritual  freedom  which  the  entire  work  of 
Goethe's  own  life  sought  to  secure  for  his  fellow  men. 
In  this  view  Goethe  was  right,  for  Byron  was  at  least 
struggling  toward  a  higher  ideal  of  freedom  than 
that  which  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth,  in  their  early 
revolutionary  enthusiasm,  had  in  view.  Had  Goethe 
become  better  acquainted  with  the  work  of  Shelley, 
he  could  hardly  have  failed  to  recognise  in  that  work, 
as  we  now  recognise  in  it,  a  spirit  more  akin  to  his 
own  than  that  which  was  manifested  in  the  work  of 
Byron.  The  ideals  which  remained  turbid  in  the  best 
of  Byron's  rhetoric  became  clarified  in  Shelley's  song,  ' 
and  it  is  in  the  latter  poet  that  the  freedom  of  the 
spirit  finds  its  supreme  expression  in  English  litera- 
ture. And  in  our  own  time,  the  message  of  Goethe 
and  Shelley  again  comes  to  our  ears  in  the  words  of 
Ibsen,  who  expresses  the  fundamental  distinction  be- 
tween Coleridge  and  Wordsworth  in  their  revolution- 
ary phase,  on  the  one  hand,  and  B3^ron  and  Shelley 
on  the  other,  when  he  says :  "Men  still  call  for  special 
revolutions — for  revolutions  in  politics,  in  externals. 
But  all  that  sort  of  thing  is  trumpery.  It  is  the 
human  soul  that  must  revolt."     The  distinction  be- 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        107 

tween  the  two  conceptions  of  freedom  to  be  found  in 
the  work  of  the  EngHsh  poets  of  the  Revolution  has 
been  so  clearly  drawn  by  Dr.  Brandes,  in  his  "Main 
Currents  in  the  Literature  of  the  Nineteenth  Cen- 
tury," that  I  wish  to  translate  from  him  at  some 
length.  To  analyse  this  twofold  use  of  the  concept, 
he  says,  we  must  ask  two  simple  questions:  freedom 
from  what?  freedom  to  do  what.^  and  he  continues 
as  follows: 

"For  these  con servative  poets  freedom  is  a  single  definite  thing, 
which  England  has^anH^which  Europe^lacks,  the  right  of  a 
country  to  govern  itself  without  an  absolute  ruler,  particularly 
without  an  absolute  ruler  of  foreign  origin.  The  country 
which  has  this  privilege  is  free.  Freedom  in  this  camp  means 
freedom  from  foreign  political  despotism;  freedom  to  do 
something  does  not  enter  into  the  question.  Glance  at  Words- 
worth's sonnets  upon  freedom,  and  see  what  he  sings  about. 
It  is  the  struggle  of  the  European  peoples  against  Napoleon, 
who  figures  as  a  sort  of  Antichrist.  The  poet  laments  the 
French  conquest  of  Spain,  of  Switzerland,  of  Venice,  of  the 
Tyrol.  .  .  .  His  poems  follow  his  country  in  its  struggles,  and, 
like  Southey,  he  celebrates  each  of  its  victories." 

For  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth,  the  people  as  it 
was  constituted  an  ideal,  but  Byron  and  Shelley 

/'sought  to  compel  their  people  to  direct  its  gaze  toward  a 
distant,  even  an  unrecognised  ideal;  the  former  flattered  the 
people  and  WCTe"  crowned  wltTi  laurel,  the  latter  instructed 
and  disciplined  the  people  and  were  cast  out  of  its 
bosom.  .  .  .  For  these  latter  the  idea  of  freedom  was  not 
to  be  realised  in  a  country  or  in  a  constitution;  it  was 
no  ready-made  thing,  nor  for  them  was  the  struggle  for  free- 
dom realised  in  an  essentially  selfish  war  against  a  revolu- 
tionary  conqueror.     They    felt   deeply   how   great   a   bondage, 


I 


108        SAIVIUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

political  as  well  as  spiritual,  religious  as  well  as  social,  might 
exist  under  a  so-called  free  constitution.  Not  deeply  aroused 
to  sing  hymns  of  praise  concerning  what  mankind,  and 
particularly  their  fellow  countrjTQen,  had  accomplished,  they 
felt  under  the  so-called  free  regime  a  deep  and  burning  need 
of  freedom,  a  need  of  freedom  to  do  many  things — to  think  1 
without  regard  for  dogma  and  to  write  without  bowing  to 
public  opinion,  to  act  in  consonance  with  the  inmost  individuality 
without  being  controlled  by  people  who,  themselves  without 
distinctive  personality,  were  the  most  esteemed  and  the  most 
merciless  judges  of  those  defects  of  character  which  were 
bound  up  with  self-suflBciency,  originality,  and  genius.  .  .  . 
For  the  Lake  poets  constraint  was  not  constraint  if  it  was 
English,  tyramiy  was  not  tyranny  if  it  proceeded  from  the 
constitutional  monarchy,  obscurantism  was  not  really  ob- 
scurantism if  it  proceeded  from  the  Protestant  church.  The 
radical  poets  called  constraint  constraint,  even  when  it  raised 
England's  own  banner  over  its  head  and  confronted  its  op- 
ponents with  the  English  cockade;  they  extended  the  opposition 
against  absolute  kings  to  kings  in  general,  they  wished  the 
world  not  merely  freed  from  the  rule  of  Catholic  priests  but 
from  priestcraft  of  every  description.  When  they  beheld  the 
poets  of  the  opposing  school,  who  in  the  ardour  of  youth  had 
gone  quite  as  far  as  they  themselves  had  gone,  devote  them- 
selves with  all  the  zeal  of  renegades  to  the  laudation  of  the 
Tory  government  of  England,  they  could  not  consider  such 
men  as  other  than  the  enemies  of  freedom.  .  .  .  When  Shelley 
sings  of  freedom,  we  feel  that  it  is  no  thing  to  be  seized  by  the 
hands,  or  granted  by  a  constitution,  or  confirmed  by  a  national 
church,  but  that  it  is  the  eternal  demand  of  the  human  spirit, 
its  indispensable  craving,  the  fire  from  heaven  which  Prome- 
theus set  as  a  spark  in  the  human  heart,  and  which  it  has  been 
the  endeavour  of  the  greatest  poets  to  fan  into  flame,  which 
is  the  source  of  all  light  and  warmth  for  those  who  feel  how 
cold  and  deathly  life  would  be  without  it.  This  is  the  freedom 
which  in  every  century  arises  under  a  new  name,  which  in  the 
Middle  Ages  was  persecuted  and  rooted  out  under  the  name  of 
heresy,  in  the  sixteenth  centurj^  was  fought  and  championed 
under  the  name  of  Reformation,  in  the  seventeenth  century 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        109 

was  doomed  to  fire  and  sword  as  witchcraft  and  atheism,  in 
the  eighteenth  century  became  a  gospel  in  the  form  of  phi- 
losophy and  then  with  the  Revolution  a  power  in  political  guise, 
and  which  finally  in  our  own  century  receives  the  contemptuous 
epithet  of  'radicalism'  from  the  spokesmen  of  an  outworn  past." 

Thus  far  Dr.  Brandes,  whose  own  pronounced 
radicahsm  makes  him  a  pecuHarly  unsympathetic 
critic  of  the  conservative  temper.  ''  We  can  easily^  / 
understand  how,  to  such  a  mind,  a  thinker  of  the 
type  of  Coleridge  must  appear  in  an  altogether  un- 
favourable light.  At  an  early  age  Coleridge  came 
to  realise  the  inadequacy,  if  not  the  futility,  of  the 
external  ideal  of  freedom  which  had  enlisted  his 
youthful  sympathies.  The  bent  of  his  intellect  was 
such  as  to  make  it  impossible  that  he  should  trans- 
form this  ideal  into  the  deeper  one  of  spiritual  free- 
dom  as  conceived  by  Goethe  and  Shelley.  As  far  as 
the  institutions  and  the  organisation  of  society  were 
concerned,  he  accepted  the  reactionary  programme 
almost  in  its  entirety,  and  seemed  to  delight  in  its 
bondage.  Freedom  to  dream  was  about  the  only 
freedom  that  his  personal  need  demanded,  and  in  this 
he  could  indulge  as  an  adherent  of  the  Monarchy, 
the  Establishment,  and  the  conservative  order  in  gen- 
eral. Thought  and  action  became  in  him  so  dis- 
sociated, speculation  became  a  thing  so  unrelated  to 
practical  life,  that  he  did  not  feel  the  imperious  need 
of  that  form  of  aggressive  intellectual  freedom  which 
ever  seeks  to  ally  itself  with  deed,  and  to  become 
translated  into  the  terms  of  life.     He  remained  a 


*/t'^ 


110        SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

visionary  throughout  his  career,  for  imagination 
overbalanced  the  practical  instinct,  and  the  infirmity 
of  his  will  precluded  him  from  acting  effectively  and 
directly  upon  his  age  in  accordance  with  any  definite 
plan.  We  smile  at  some  of  the  earlier  efforts  of 
Shelley  to  give  effect  to  his  ideaHsm,  but  they  seem 
the  very  embodiment  of  hard  practical  sense  when 
compared  with  the  best  efforts  of  Coleridge  to  fit 
means  with  ends.  From  his  cliildhood  he  was  marked 
out  to  be  a  dreamer.     He  says : 

"I  used  to  lie  by  the  wall  and  mope;  and  my  spirits  used  to 
come  upon  me  sudden,  and  in  a  flood;  and   I  then  was  ac- 
customed to  run  up  and  down  the  church-yard  and  act  over 
again  all  I  had  been  reading,  to  the  docks  and  the  nettles  and 
the  rank  grass.  ...     At  six  years  of  age  ...  I     found    the 
'Arabian  Nights'  Entertainments,'  one  tale  of  which  .  .  .  made 
so    deep    an    impression    on    me  .  .  .  that    I    was    haunted   by 
spectres  whenever  I  was  in  the  dark;  and  I  distinctly  recollect 
the  anxious  and  fearful  eagerness  with  which  I  used  to  watch 
the  window  where  the  book  lay,  and  when  the  sun  came  upon  it, 
I  would  seize  it,  carrj'  it  by  the  wall,  and  bask  and  read.  •  •  •  l 
So  I  became  a  dreamer,  and  acquired  an  indisposition  to  all  a 
bodily  activit}'.  ...     I  never  thought  as  a  child,  never  had  the  ' 
language   of  a   child.  .  .  .     From   my   early   reading  of   fairy 
tales  and  about  genii,  and  the  like,  my  mind  had  been  habituated  I 
to  the  Vast;  and  I  never  regarded  my  senses  in  any  way  as  the  j  j 
criteria   of  my  belief.     I  regulated  all  my  creeds  by  my  con-l'V 
ceptions,  not  by  my  sight,  even  at  that  age."  ^  ^  J 


No  wonder  that  the  childhood  whose  fancy  was  thus 
unregulated  grew  into  the  manhood  which  described 
"accounts  of  all  strange  phantasms  that  ever  pos- 
sessed your   philosophy-dreamers,"   as   its  "darling 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        111 

studies,"  and  found  sustenance  in  the  neo-Platonism 
of  Proclus  and  Plotinus.  The  tendency  to  my&tlcism, 
thus  manifested  at  an  early  age,  became  the  char- 
acteristic feature  of  the  poet's  thought.  Expressed 
in  verse,  it  gave  to  EngHsh  Hterature  those  composi- 
tions which  for  sheer  imaginative  vision  stand  abso- 
lutely without  companions,  and  indicate  the  high- 
water  mark  of  the  poet's  genius.  Expressed  in  prose, 
it  introduced  into  English  philosophy  an  element 
which  was  much  needed  by  the  countrymen  of  Hobbes 
and  Locke,  the  element  of  transcendentalism  which 
Coleridge  brought  Fack  with  him  from  Germany. 
It  is  to  be  noted  that,  as  at  an  earlier  period  he  had 
found  sustenance  in  the  neo-Platonists  rather  than 
in  Plato  himself,  so  his  excursions  into  German  phi- 
losophy made  him  better  acquainted  with  the  second- 
rate  thinkers  who  were  the  successors  of  Kant  rather 
than  with  Kant  himself.  The  compact  and  logical 
structure  of  the  Kantian  system  made  less  appeal  to 
him  than  the  blurred  and  distorted  outlines  of  that 
system  as  they  appeared  in  the  iridescent  romantic 
colouring  of  Schelling.  For  a  philosophy  devoid  of 
mysticism  he  could  have  little  sympathy,  and  the 
element  of  mysticism  was  supplied  by  Schelling.  Car- 
lyle,  a  few  years  later,  similarly  seeking  the  German 
philosophical  pasture,  required  a  more  dominant  and 
aggressive  ethical  doctrine  than  Kant  could  provide, 
and  found  it  in  Fichte.  I  might  also  mention  the 
case  of  our  own  Concord  philosophers,  who  got  so 
much  valuable  stimulus  from  their  explorations  of 


112        SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

German  philosophy,  but  who  got  it  mainly  from  the 
secondary  sources.  They  had  a  great  deal  to  say 
about  transcendentahsm,  but  it  is  doubtful  if  they 
ever  understood  its  meaning.  And  it  is  likewise  doubt- 
ful if  Coleridge  ever  had  any  conception  of  what  the 
"Critique  of  Pure  Reason"  had  accomplished  for 
philosophical  thought.  His  own  attitude  toward  the 
fundamental  problem  of  philosophy  is  that  which 
Walter  Pater  has  characterised  in  the  following 
words:  "The  suspicion  of  a  mind  latent  in  nature, 
struggling  for  relief,  and  intercourse  with  the  intel- 
lect of  man  through  true  ideas,  has  never  ceased  to 
haunt  a  certain  class  of  minds.  .  .  .  Wherever  the 
speculative  instinct  has  been  united  with  a  certain 
poetic  inwardness  of  temperament,  as  in  Bruno,  in 
Schelling,  there  that  old  Greek  conception,  like  some 
seed  floating  in  the  air,  has  taken  root  and  sprung  up 
anew."  Coleridge  had  precisely  this  type  of  mind, 
and  his  philosophy,  if  we  may  give  so  ambitious  a 
name  to  so  incoherent  a  thing,  is  a  philosophy  in 
which  nature  is  viewed  as  thus  interpenetrated  with 
the  element  of  the  Divine.  His  philosophy  embodies 
a  reaction  from  the  eighteenth-century  philosophy 
of  experience,  and  endeavours  to  restore  the  intuitive 
faculty  to  the  place  from  which  it  has  been  cast. 
Coleridge  fastened  particularly  upon  the  technical 
Kantian  distinction  between  understanding  and  rea- 
son {V  erst  and  and  Vernunft)  and  made  it  the  control- 
ling principle  of  his  philosophical  teaching.  John 
Stuart  Mill's  statement  of  this  doctrine,  as  held  by 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        113 

Coleridge,  may  be  quoted  by  way  of  explana- 
tion. 

"He  claims  for  the  human  mind  a  capacity,  within  certain 
limits,  of  perceiving  the  nature  and  properties  of  things  in 
themselves!  He  distinguishes  in  the  human  intellect  two 
faculties,  which,  in  the  technical  language  common  to  him  with 
the  Germans,  he  calls  Understanding  and  Reason.  The  former 
faculty  judges  of  phenomena,  or  the  appearances  of  things, 
and  forms  generalisations  from  these:  to  the  latter  it  belongs, 
by  direct  intuition,  to  perceive  things,  and  recognise  truths, 
not  cognisable  by  our  senses.  These  perceptions  are  not  indeed 
innate,  nor  could  ever  have  been  awakened  in  us  without  ex- 
perience; but  they  are  not  copies  of  it:  experience  is  not  their 
prototype;  it  is  only  the  occasion  by  which  they  are  irresistibly 
suggested.  .  .  .  Among  the  truths  which  are  thus  known 
d  priori,  by  occasion  of  experience,  but  not  themselves  the  sub- 
ject of  experience,  Coleridge  includes  the  fundamental  doc- 
trines of  religion  and  morals,  the  principles  of  mathematics, 
and  the  ultimate  laws  even  of  physical  nature;  which  he  con- 
tends cannot  be  proved  by  experience,  though  they  must  neces- 
sarily be  consistent  with  it,  and  would,  if  we  knew  them 
perfectly,  enable  us  to  account  for  all  observed  facts,  and  to 
predict  all  those  which  are  as  yet  unobserved." 

Provided  with  this  distinction  as  a  basis  for  his  philo- 
sophical reflections,  Coleridge  believed  that  it  was  pos- 
sible to  harmonise  the  conquests  of  metaphysical 
thought  with  the  doctrines  of  revealed  religion  as 
held  by  the  Church  of  which  he  became  so  zealous  a 
champion.  His  belief  in  the  transcendental  power 
of  the  reason  opened  the  way  for  his  intellectual 
acceptance  of  the  ideas,  however  fantastic,  that 
appealed  to  him  in  the  writings  of  such  men  as 
Bruno,  and  Boehme,  and  the  author  of  the  "Theologia 


114        SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

Germanica."  "The  writings  of  these  mystics,"  he 
himself  confesses, 

"acted  in  no  slight  degree  to  prevent  my  mind  from  being 
imprisoned  within  the  outline  of  any  single  dogmatic  system. 
They  contributed  to  keep  alive  the  heart  in  the  head;  gave  me 
an  indistinct,  yet  stirring  and  working  presentiment,  that  all 
the  products  of  the  mere  reflective  faculty  partook  of  death, 
and  were  as  the  rattling  twigs  and  sprays  in  winter,  into  which 
a  sap  was  yet  to  be  propelled  from  some  root  to  which  I  had 
not  penetrated,  if  they  were  to  afi'ord  my  soul  either  food  or 
shelter.  If  they  were  too  often  a  moving  cloud  of  smoke  to 
me  by  day,  yet  they  were  always  a  pillar  of  fire  throughout 
the  night,  during  my  wanderings  through  the  wilderness  of 
doubt,  and  enabled  me  to  skirt,  without  crossing,  the  sandy 
deserts  of  utter  unbelief." 

Coleridge  shares  with  Scott  and  Carlyle  the  dis- 
tinction of  having  been  a  pioneer  in  the  work  of 
making  the  English  pubHc  acquainted  with  the 
literary  and  philosophical  movement  of  German 
thought.  The  nineteenth-century  influence  of  Ger- 
man upon  English  literature  has  been  no  less  wide- 
spread and  profound  than  were  the  earlier  influences 
of  Italian  and  French  literature.  Before  these  three 
men  did  their  work,  German  literature  was  prac- 
tically unknown  in  England,  and  few  Englishmen 
ever  thought  of  learning  the  German  language. 
Since  their  time,  German  literature  has  become  the 
greatest  of  all  foreign  influences  upon  our  own,  and 
acquaintance  with  the  German  language  has  become 
indispensable  for  every  reader  who  hopes  to  keep 
abreast  of  modern  culture.  The  particular  treasures 
of  thought  or  of  literary  expression  which  these  men 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        115 

brought  back  from  their  German  wanderings  are  of 
less  importance  than  the  simple  fact  that  they  turned 
the  minds  of  Englishmen  toward  German  sources  of 
inspiration.  In  most  matters  of  intellectual  concern, 
England  at  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century 
had  fallen  behind  the  rest  of  Europe.  It  took  a  pa- 
rochial view  of  both  art  and  life.  In  literature,  the  ro- 
mantic movement  in  England  was  struggling  to  make 
itself  felt,  while  upon  the  Continent  it  was  carrying 
all  before  it.  The  England  of  an  earlier  age  had 
taught  political  philosophy  to  the  rest  of  Europe,  but 
was  forgetting  its  own  lessons,  while  other  countries 
were  bettering  the  instruction.  Weimar  and  Konigs- 
berg  were  the  intellectual  foci  of  the  Continent,  and 
the  influence  of  Goethe  and  Kant  was  quickening  the 
Hfe  of  the  new  generation.  Nor  was  the  predomi- 
nance of  Germany  dependent  alone  upon  the  influ- 
ence of  the  greatest  of  modern  poets  and  the  great- 
est of  modern  philosophers.  The  new  movement  had 
aff^ected  all  the  departments  of  intellectual  and  artis- 
tic activity.  Under  the  influence  of  Herder,  a  new 
philosophy  of  history  had  come  into  being.  A  new 
sense  of  the  meaning  of  classical  art  had  been  created 
by  Winckelmann  and  Lessing.  Lessing  had  also  given 
to  criticism  a  new  significance.  Classical  scholarship 
had  received  a  new  impetus  from  the  bold  specula- 
tions of  Wolf.  The  one  new  art  of  the  modern  world 
— the  art  of  music — had  found  its  richest  develop- 
ment in  Germany,  and  had  achieved  almost  complete 
mastery  of  its  material.     Of  all  this  vigorous  intel- 


116        SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

lectual  life  England  knew  practically  nothing  until 
Coleridge  and  Carlyle  made  their  report,  and  ap- 
priseTTheir  countrymen  that  the  spirit  of  slothful- 
ness  was  fast  leading  them  to  a  condition  of  intel- 
lectual decay. 

"In  the  more  advanced  nations  of  the  Continent,"  says  Mill, 
"the  prevailing  philosophy  had  done  its  work  completely:  it 
had  spread  itself  over  every  department  of  human  knowledge; 
it  had  taken  possession  of  the  whole  Continental  mind;  and 
scarcely  one  educated  person  was  left  who  retained  any  alle- 
giance to  the  opinons  or  the  institutions  of  ancient  times.  In 
England,  the  native  country  of  compromise,  things  had  stopped 
far  short  of  this;  the  philosophical  movement  had  been  brought 
to  a  halt  in  an  early  stage;  and  a  peace  had  been  patched  up 
by  concessions  on  both  sides,  between  the  philosophy  of  the 
time  and  its  traditional  institutions  and  creeds.  Hence  the 
aberrations  of  the  age  were  generally,  on  the  Continent,  at 
that  period,  the  extravagances  of  new  opinions;  in  England,  the 
corruptions  of  old  ones." 

As  a  specific  illustration  of  this  blissful  insular  igno- 
rance of  what  the  world  at  large  was  thinking  and 
doing,  Mill  mentions  the  fact  that  an  English  scholar 
of  repute  had  recently  announced,  "with  all  the  pomp 
and  heraldry  of  triumphant  genius,"  the  discovery 
that  "the  Roman  Empire  perished,  not  from  outward 
violence,  but  from. inward  decay;  and  that  the  bar- 
barian conquerors  were  the  renovators,  not  the  de- 
stroyers, of  its  civilisation."  Whereupon  Mill  ob- 
serves :  "There  is  not  a  schoolboy  in  France  or  Ger- 
many who  did  not  possess  this  writer's  discovery 
before  him:  the  contrary  opinion  has  receded  so  far 
into   the   past,   that   it   must   be   rather   a   learned 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        117 

Frenchman  or  German  who  remembers  that  it  was 
ever  held."  This  indication  of  the  intellectual  con- 
dition of  the  nation  that  had  produced  a  Gibbon 
shows  how  greatly  the  England  of  the  early  nine- 
teenth century  was  in  need  of  a  current  of  fresh 
thought.  It  was  the  mission  of  Coleridge  and  a 
few  of  his  contemporaries  to  divert  this  current  into 
the  English  channels  that  had  run  dry,  and  to  irri- 
gate the  soil  as  a  preparation  for  a  new  intellectual 
harvest.  It  was  not,  then,  merely  as  the  translator 
of  Schiller's  "Wallenstein"  that  Coleridge  brought 
the  German  influence  into  English  literature,  it  was 
rather  as  the  student  of  the  great  philosophers  and 
scholars  and  humanists  of  the  Continent  that  he  per- 
formed his  essential  service  to  his  countrymen.  Im- 
perfect and  confused  as  was  his  apprehension  of  the 
new  thought  which  he  thus  aimed  to  interpret,  his 
influence  was  very  great  because  it  was  exerted  in 
the  right  direction  rather  than  because  of  any  finality 
in  what  it  immediately  accomplished.  Mill  hardly 
says  too  much  of  him  when  he  declares,  writing  in 
1840,  that,  "Bentham  excepted,  no  Englishman  has 
left  his  impress  so  deeply  in  the  opinions  and  mental 
tendencies  of  those  among  us  who  attempt  to  en- 
lighten their  practice  by  philosophical  meditation." 
What  Coleridge  did  for  England  at  this  time  was 
similar  to  what  Madame  de  Stael  and  Benjamin 
Constant  had  done  a  few  years  before  for  France, 
and  what  Henrik  Steff'ens  was  at  the  same  time  doing 
for  the  Scandinavian  countries.     In  the  history  of 


118        SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

intellectual  development,  there  are  no  more  inter- 
esting periods  than  those  in  which  some  nation,  which 
has  lagged  behind  in  the  race,  receives  the  impact  of  j 
fresh  ideas  from  abroad,  and  responds  to  their  quick-) 
ening  influence.  This  is  what  gives  such  extraordi- 
nary interest  to  the  study  of  the  Renaissance  period, 
the  eighteenth-century  period  of  French  political 
philosophy,  and  our  own  modern  period  of  complex 
international  and  interracial  reactions. 

In  the  history  of  literary  criticism  Coleridge  occu- 
pies an  important  place,  and  his  influence  upon  mod- 
ern English  poetics  has  been  considerable.  It  would 
have  been  far  greater  were  it  not  for  the  frag- 
mentary character  of  his  critical  writings.  His 
marginalia,  his  lecture-notes,  and  liis  "Biographia 
Literaria"  constitute  a  rich  treasury  of  subtle 
thought  upon  the  problems  of  literary  art,  and  no 
student  can  afl'ord  to  neglect  them.  The  exposition 
is  often  laboured  and  forbidding,  but  the  reader  will 
find  his  reward  in  those  flashes  of  insight  which  so 
frequently  illuminate  the  subject  under  discussion, 
and  penetrate  to  the  very  heart  of  the  question  at 
issue.  What  Professor  Dowden  calls  "the  passion 
for  truth-seeking  and  the  desire  to  find  rest  in 
primary  principles"  are  everywhere  characteristic 
of  Coleridge's  criticism,  when  dealing  with  a  literary 
composition  no  less  than  with  a  system  of  meta- 
physics. This  endeavour  to  fix  upon  fundamentaT\ 
ideas,  and  to  estimate  literature  in  accordance  with  I 
them,  marks  a  new  departure  in  English  criticism.  \ 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        119 

It  is  one  application  of  the  lesson  which  Coleridge 
learned  from  the  German,  and  it  gives  to  his  critical 
vision  a  depth  greater  than  that  possessed  by  the 
vision  of  his  predecessors  of  the  seventeenth  and 
eighteenth  centuries.  What  his  thoroughgoing 
methods  did  for  Shakespeare  is  well  kno^vn ;  they 
helped  Englishmen  to  understand  the  true  greatness  of 
their  myriad-minded  poet  as  it  had  never  been  under- 
stood before.  The  methods  proved  equally  illuminat- 
ing when  applied  to  the  critic's  own  contemporaries, 
and  in  defending  Wordsworth  the  poet  against 
Wordsworth  tlie  theorist  Coleridge  _marl^  out  a 
true  critical  course,  and  anticipated  the  verdict  of 
posterity.  If  we  set  any  page  of  Coleridge  side  by 
side  with  any  page  of  Dr.  Johnson,  the  differences 
in  method  and  in  spirit  appear  startling  indeed.  The 
one  is  all  prejudice  and  dogmatism,  the  other  is  all 
suggestion  and  inquiry.  To  find  "the  inner  springs 
of  life  in  each  work  of  art,  and  so  put  us  on  the 
track  which  the  artist  followed  in  the  act  of  crea- 
tion" is  the  aim  of  Coleridge,  as  it  has  been  the  aim 
of  all  serious  criticism  since  his  time.  The  essential 
article  of  his  creed,  as  far  as  poetry  is  concerned,  is 
found  in  the  following  passage:  "I  adopt  with  full 
faith  the  principle  of  Aristotle,  that  poetry,  as 
poetry,  is  essentially  ideal,  that  it  avoids  and  ex- 
cludes all  accident;  that  its  apparent  individualities 
of  rank,  character,  or  occupation,  must  be  repre- 
sentative of  a  class:  and  that  the  persons  of  poetry 
must   be   clothed   with   generic   attributes,  with   the 


120       SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

common  attributes  of  the  class :  not  with  such  as  one 
gifted  individual  might  possibly  possess,  but  such 
as  from  his  situation  it  is  most  probable  beforehand 
that  he  would  possess."  This  quotation  must  suffice 
for  our  present  purpose;  to  disentangle  the  critical 
principles  of  Coleridge  from  their  context  of  bramble, 
and  to  set  them  forth  in  any  coherent  and  orderly 
fashion,  is  a  task  that  would  require  a  volume  to 
itself.  I  must  remain  content  with  calling  attention 
to  the  fact  that  Coleridge  is  one  of  those  poets  who, 
like  Wordsworth  and  Arnold,  are  also  important 
critics,  and  not  a  poet  who  eschews  criticism,  as 
Keats  did,  or  whose  excursions  into  criticism,  like 
those  of  Byron,  were  so  luckless  as  to  make  us  wish 
that  they  had  never  been  taken. 

Although  primarily  a  poet,  Coleridge  was  so  much 
more  than  a  poet  that  any  well-proportioned  account 
of  his  activities  must  take  account  of  many  other 
things  besides  his  verse.  Some  account  has  already 
been  taken  of  his  philosophy  and  of  his  criticism. 
We  all  know  the  words  of  Lamb's  passionate  invoca- 
tion to  the  memory  of  the  friend  of  his  youth,  who 
even  as  a  boy  gave  evidence  of  the  speculative  range 
that  was  to  characterise  the  thought  of  his  man- 
hood: 

"Come  back  into  memory,  like  as  thou  wert  in  the  dayspririg 
of  thy  fancies,  with  hope  like  a  fiery  column  before  thee — the 
dark  pillar  not  yet  turned — Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge — Logician, 
Metaphysician,  Bard! — How  have  I  seen  the  casual  passer 
through  the  cloisters  stand  still,  entranced  with  admiration, 
(while  he  weighed  the  disproportion  between  the  speech   and 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        121 

the  garb  of  the  young  Mirandula),  to  hear  thee  unfold,  in 
thy  deep  and  sweet  intonations,  the  mysteries  of  Jamblichus, 
or  Plotinus  (for  even  in  those  years  thou  waxedst  not  pale 
at  such  philosophic  draughts),  or  reciting  Homer  in  his  Greek, 
or  Pindar — while  the  walls  of  the  old  Grey  Friars  re-echoed 
to  the  accents  of  the  inspired  charity  boyT 

In  this  famous  passage,  the  metaphysician  takes 
precedence  over  the  poet,  and  the  prose  writings  of 
Coleridge,  as  we  know,  greatly  exceed  in  quantity  his 
original  verse.  When  we  consider  the  fact  that  for 
about  fifteen  years  of  the  best  part  of  his  life  the 
pillar  of  fire  was  transformed  into  the  pillar  of  cloud, 
we  may  well  be  surprised  at  the  extent  and  value  of 
his  performance.  Something  must  be  said  of  those 
phases  of  his  activity  which  made  him  a  journalist 
and  a  lecturer.  His  first  venture  in  journalism  was 
The  Watchman,  of  which  Mr.  Traill  gives  an  inter- 
esting account. 

"This  paper  was  to  be  published  on  every  eighth  day,  so  that 
the  week-day  of  its  appearance  would  of  course  vary  with  each 
successive  week — an  arrangement  as  ingeniously  calculated  to 
irritate  and  alienate  its  public  as  any,  perhaps,  that  the  wit 
of  man  could  have  devised.  By  dint  of  diligent  canvassing  a 
subscription-list  was  secured  and  the  publication  began.  Ten 
numbers  were  issued  altogether,  and  then  it  came  to  an  end. 
A  naturally  short  life  was  suicidally  shortened.  In  the  second 
number,  records  Coleridge,  with  delightful  naivete,  'an  essay 
against  fast-days,  with  a  most  censurable  application  of  a  text 
from  Isaiah  (Wherefore  my  bowels  shall  sound  like  a  harp) 
for  its  motto,  lost  me  near  five  hundred  subscribers  at  one  blow.* 
In  the  two  following  numbers  he  made  enemies  of  all  his 
Jacobin  and  democratic  patrons  by  playing  Balaam  to  the 
legislation    of    the    government    and    pronouncing    something 


122        SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

almost  like  a  blessing  on  the  'gagging  bills' — measures,  he 
declared,  which,  'whatever  the  motive  of  their  introduction, 
would  produce  an  effect  to  be  desired  by  all  true  friends  of 
freedom,  as  far  as  they  should  contribute  to  deter  men  from 
openly  declaiming  on  subjects  the  principles  of  which  they  had 
never  fathomed,  and  from  pleading  to  the  poor  and  ignorant 
instead  of  pleading  for  them.'  At  the  same  time  the  editor 
of  'The  Watchman  avowed  his  conviction  that  national  educa- 
tion and  a  concurring  spread  of  the  gospel  were  the  indispen- 
sable conditions  of  any  true  political  amelioration.  We  can 
hardly  wonder,  on  the  whole,  that  by  the  time  the  seventh  num- 
ber was  published  its  predecessors  were  being  exposed  in  sim- 
dry  old-iron  shops  at  a  penny  apiece.' " 

On  his  return  from  Germany,  Coleridge  began  to  con- 
tribute regularly  to  The  Morning  Post,  for  which  he 
wrote  for  some  three  years,  but  the  efforts  of  the 
proprietor,  his  friend  Mr.  Stuart,  and  very  liberal 
offers,  could  not  induce  him  to  give  his  whole  attention 
to  journahsm.  That  the  work  which  he  did  in  this 
connection  was  able  goes  without  saying.  Of  his 
merits  as  a  professional  journalist  Mr.  Traill  has 
the  highest  opinion.  His  second  and  most  important 
venture  for  himself  in  the  field  of  journahsm  was 
made  in  1809,  when  the  first  number  of  The  Friend 
made  its  appearance.  A  paper  whose  main  object 
was  "to  estabhsh  the  philosophical  distinction  be- 
tween the  reason  and  the  understanding"  could 
hardly  hope  for  a  popular  success,  and  he  handi- 
capped himself  at  the  start  by  selecting  an  out-of- 
the-way  town,  twenty-eight  miles  from  his  own  resi- 
dence, as  the  place  of  publication.  A  list  of  one 
hundred  subscribers  was  obtained,  ninety  of  whom 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        123 

threw  up  their  subscriptions  without  notice  before 
the  appearance  of  the  fourth  number.  The  paper 
lived  on  through  twenty-eight  issues,  and  then  gave 
up  the  ghost.  A  brief  connection  with  The  Courier, 
in  which  his  work  showed  Httle  of  the  old  vigour,  is 
the  last  episode  in  his  life  as  a  journalist. 

Coleridge  took  to  lecturing  as  he  took  to  journal- 
ism, in  a  random,  haphazard  sort  of  fashion,  and  does 
not  seem  to  have  had  much  more  taste  for  it  than 
Carlyle  had.  His  first  series  of  lectures,  on  poetry 
and  the  fine  arts,  was  delivered  in  1808.  It  was  not 
very  successful,  as  Coleridge  was  then  in  no  condi- 
tion to  do  any  kind  of  sustained  mental  work,  and  he 
frequently  disappointed  his  audiences  by  failing  to 
appear  at  all.  Two  years  after,  he  gave  his  lectures 
on  Shakespeare,  decidedly  his  most  valuable  plat- 
form utterance,  and  a  priceless  contribution  to  the 
meagre  literature  of  worthy  Shakespearean  criticism. 
In  1814  he  repeated,  in  substance,  some  of  his  earlier 
lectures;  this  time,  however,  not  at  London,  but  at 
Bristol.  In  1818  he  gave  his  last  course  of  lectures 
— fourteen  in  number — chiefly  remarkable  for  their 
immense  scope,  the  subject  of  the  first  of  them  being 
"the  manners,  morals,  literature,  philosophy,  reli- 
gion, and  state  of  society  in  general  in  European 
Christendom,  from  the  eighth  to  the  fifteenth  cen- 
tury," while  the  others  were  in  proportion.  An 
interesting  account  of  a  lecture  given  at  this  time 
before  the  London  Philosophical  Society,  affords  a 
good  illustration  of  the  marvellous   powers   of  ex- 


124       SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

tempore  discourse  which  at  all  times  so  impressed 
all  who  came  into  close  personal  contact  with  Cole- 
ridge. For  some  reason  or  other  it  was  desired  that 
this  lecture  should  be  entirely  impromptu,  and  he 
knew  nothing  of  the  subject  upon  which  he  was  to 
speak  until  he  found  himself  upon  the  platform  and 
facing  his  audience.  He  was  then  told  that  he  was 
expected  to  speak  upon  "The  Growth  of  the  Individ- 
ual Mind,"  "a  pretty  stiff  subject"  for  an  extempore 
address,  as  he  whispered  to  a  friend  at  his  side  upon 
hearing  it  announced.  He  spoke  for  over  an  hour 
and  a  half  and  held  his  audience  to  the  last  by  the 
eloquence,  learning,  and  philosophical  power  he  dis- 
ployed.  Of  the  ability  of  Coleridge  as  a  lecturer  we 
shall  never  be  able  to  form  a  just  estimate.  Those 
of  his  lectures  which  are  preserved  and  printed  with 
his  other  works  are  for  the  most  part  in  the  form 
of  rough  notes,  and  evidently  bear  little  resemblance 
to  what  he  actually  said.  Powerful  these  notes  are, 
and  those  upon  Shakespearean  criticism  are,  even  in 
this  state,  of  quite  inestimable  value,  but  judging 
them  most  favourably,  the  impression  produced  by 
the  perusal  of  his  lectures  or  his  conversations  as 
they  now  appear  in  print,  does  not  tally  with  the  im- 
pression which  so  many  observers  bear  witness  to  his 
having  actually  produced  upon  his  hearers.  The 
best  part  of  Coleridge  the  lecturer  is  gone  forever 
with  those  who  had  the  inestimable  privilege  of  hear- 
ing him  speak. 

When  Mill,  writing  a  few  years  after  the  death  of 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        125 

Coleridge,  expressed  the  opinion  that  no  one  had 
contributed  more  toward  shaping  the  ideas  of  the 
younger  generation,  he  must  have  had  chiefly  in  mind 
the  lecturer  and  journalist  rather  than  the  maker  of 
books.  He  must  also  have  taken  largely  into  account 
the  marvellous  personal  influence  which  Coleridge 
exerted  over  all  who  came  into  close  contact  with 
him.  All  the  evidence  goes  to  show  that  he  was  one 
of  the  best  talkers  that  ever  lived,  a  fact  which 
Lamb  expressed  in  his  humorous  way  when  Cole- 
ridge once  asked  him:  "Charles,  did  you  ever  hear 
me  preach?"  "I  never  heard  you  do  anything  else,'* 
was  the  reply.  The  best  tribute  to  the  personal 
influence  of  Coleridge,  as  well  as  the  most  acute  char- 
acterisation of  his  philosophical  and  religious  char- 
acter, is  that  given  us  by  Carlyle : 

"His  express  contributions  to  poetry,  philosophy,  or  any  specific 
province  of  human  literature  or  enlightenment,  had  been  small 
and  sadly  intermittent;  but  he  had,  especially  among  young 
inquiring  men,  a  higher  than  literary,  a  kind  of  prophetic  or 
magician  character.  He  was  thought  to  hold,  he  alone  in 
England,  the  key  of  GginaaxL-aiwi-othei:  Transceadentalisms; 
knew  the  sublime  "secret  of  believing  by  'the  reason'  what  'the 
understanding'  had  been  obliged  to  fling  out  as  incredible;  and 
could  still,  after  Hume  and  Voltaire  had  done  their  best  and 
worst  with  him,  profess  himself  an  orthodox  Christian,  and  say 
and  print  to  the  Church  of  England,  with  its  singular  old 
rubrics  and  surplices  at  AlUiallowtide,  Esto  perpetua.  A  sub- 
lime man;  who,  alone  in  those  dark  days,  had  saved  his  crown 
of  spiritual  mankind;  escaping  from  the  black  materialisms, 
and  revolutionary  deluges,  with  'God,  Freedom,  Immortality' 
still  his:  a  king  of  men.  The  practical  intellects  of  the  world 
did  not  much  heed  him,  or  carelessly  reckoned  him  a  meta- 


126        SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 

physical  dreamer:  but  to  the  rising  spirits  of  the  young  genera- 
tion he  had  this  dusky  sublime  character;  and  sat  there  as  a 
kind  of  Magus,  girt  in  mystery  and  enigma;  his  Dodona  oak- 
grove  (Mr.  Gillman's  house  at  Highgate)  whispering  strange 
things,  uncertain  whether  oracles  or  jargon." 

Concerning  the  life  of  Coleridge,  the  patient  and 
loving  industry  of  J.  Dykes  Campbell  has  collected 
all  the  facts  that  are  likely  to  be  discovered,  and  that 
are  worth  preserving.  Concerning  his  poetry,  criti- 
cism has  pronounced  what  must  be  practically  the 
final  judgment.  Something  like  two- thirds  of  his 
verse  is  either  ephemeral  or  puerile  in  character,  and 
may  be  left  out  of  the  reckoning  altogether.  The 
remaining  fraction,  about  equal  in  bulk  to  that  which 
we  cherish  in  the  work  of  Keats,  constitutes  one 
of  the  supreme  achievements  of  English  poetry.  Of 
his  best  verses  Mr.  Swinburne  affirms 

"that  the  world  has  nothing  like  them,  and  can  never  have: 
that  they  are  the  highest  kind,  and  of  their  own.  They  are 
jewels  of  the  diamond's  price,  flowers  of  the  rose's  rank,  but 
unlike  any  rose  or  diamond  known.  .  .  .  The  'Christabel,'  the 
*Kubla  Khan,'  with  one  or  two  more,  are  outside  all  law  and 
jurisdiction  of  ours.  When  it  has  been  said  that  such  melodies 
were  never  heard,  such  dreams  never  dreamed,  such  speech 
never  spoken,  the  chief  thing  remains  unsaid,  and  unspeakable. 
There  is  a  charm  upon  these  poems  which  can  only  be  felt  in 
silent  submission  of  wonder.  .  .  .  The  highest  lyric  work  is 
either  passionate  or  imaginative;  of  passion  Coleridge  has 
nothing;  but  for  height  and  perfection  of  imaginative  quality 
he  is  the  greatest  of  lyric  poets.  This  was  his  special  power, 
and  this  is  his  special  praise." 

A  few  months  before  his  death,  Coleridge  wrote 
an  epitaph  for  himself.     It  is  a  simple  appeal  for 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE        127 

the  prayers  of  those  who  passed  by  his  tomb,  and 

it  has  not  the   faintest  suggestion   of  having  been 

written  by  a  great  poet.     For  our  closing  words  let 

us  turn  rather  to  the  "Tombless  Epitaph,"  written  a 

quarter  of  a  century  earlier,  which  is,  perhaps,  the 

most  intimate  bit  of  autobiography  that  the  poet 

has  left  us. 

"Sickness,  'tis  true. 
Whole  years  of  weary  days,  besieged  him  close. 
Even  to  the  gates  and  inlets  of  his  life ! 
But  it  is  true,  no  less,  that  strenuous,  firm. 
And  with  a  natural  gladness,  he  maintained 
The  citadel  unconquered,  and  in  joy 
Was  strong  to  follow  the  delightful  Muse. 
For  not  a  hidden  path,  that  to  the  shades 
Of  the  beloved  Parnassian  forest  leads. 
Lurked  undiscovered  by  him;  not  a  rill 
There  issues  from  the  fount  of  Hippocrene, 
But  he  had  traced  it  upward  to  its  source. 
Through  open  glade,  dark  glen,  and  secret  dell, 
Knew  the  gay  wild  flo\Ters  on  its  banks,  and  culled 
Its  med'cinable  herbs.     Yea,  oft  alone. 
Piercing  the  long-neglected  holy  cave. 
The  haunt  obscure  of  old  Philosophy, 
He  bade  with  lifted  torch  its  starry  walls 
Sparkle,  as  erst  they  sparkled  to  the  flame 
Of  odorous  lamps  tended  by  Saint  and  Sage." 

These  lines,  written  before  the  "shaping  spirit  of 
imagination"  had  taken  flight  from  the  poet,  afford 
a  singularly  comprehensive  and  exact  characterisa- 
tion of  his  spiritual  life.  In  them  we  are  given 
the  most  sincere  self-expression  of  one  who,  in  the 
words  of  the  dearest  of  his  friends,  had  "from  his 
childhood  hungered  for  eternity." 


Mdliam  Mor60wortb 

The  great  poet  who  was  born  thirty  years  before 
the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century,  and  who  became 
the  most  honoured  and  the  most  venerable  figure  of 
the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth,  has  been  made  the 
subject  of  more  critical  controversy  than  any  of 
his  contemporaries.  His  work  has  been  exalted  to 
the  skies  by  men  whose  opinions  carry  great 
weight,  and  it  has  been  decried  as  unsound  in  theory 
and  prosaic  in  expression  by  other  men  whose  opin- 
ions cannot  be  neglected.  In  all  this  clash  of  criti- 
cism, which  has  been  prolonged  into  our  own  time, 
it  is  to  be  observed  that  the  personal  element  has  not 
appeared  to  any  considerable  extent.  While  it  is  true 
that  Wordsworth  suffered  a  reprobation  that  was 
perhaps  deserved  on  account  of  his  renunciation  of 
the  liberal  principles  of  his  earlier  years,  he  did  not 
set  the  conventions  of  society  at  defiance  in  the  man- 
ner of  Byron  and  Shelley,  and  was  spared  the  vio- 
lence of  the  attacks  to  which  they  were  subjected. 
The  discussion  which  was  raised  about  him  in  his 
own  time,  and  which  has  continued  to  be  raised  about 
him  ever  since,  has  been  in  the  main  a  discussion  of 
literary  principles  and  assthetical  canons.     It  began 

J23 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  129 

over  one  hundred  years  ago,  when  the  second  edition 
of  the  "Lyrical  Ballads"  was  published,  with  the 
famous  Preface  which  contained  the  profession  of 
the  poet's  literary  faith.  To  a  public  educated  upon 
the  traditions  of  the  eighteenth  century  the  proposi- 
tions enunciated  in  that  essay  were  indeed  startling, 
and  their  practical  applications,  as  illustrated  by  the 
poems  which  they  accompanied,  were  of  so  uncom- 
promising a  nature  as  to  arouse  much  active  antago- 
nism. "They  who  have  been  accustomed  to  the  gaudi- 
ness  and  inane  phraseology  of  many  modern  writers, 
if  they  persist  in  reading  this  book  to  its  conclusion, 
will,  no  doubt,  frequently  have  to  struggle  with 
feelings  of  strangeness  and  awkwardness;  they  will 
look  round  for  poetry,  and  will  be  induced  to  inquire 
by  what  species  of  courtesy  these  attempts  can  be 
permitted  to  assume  that  title."  The  writer's  theory 
was  expressed  in  such  statements  as  these: 

"The  principal  object,  then,  proposed  in  these  Poems  was  to 
choose  incidents  and  situations  from  common  life,  and  to  re- 
late or  describe  them,  throughout,  as  far  as  was  possible,  in  a 
selection  of  language  really  used  by  men,  and,  at  the  same  time, 
to  throw  over  them  a  certain  colouring  of  imagination,  whereby 
ordinary  things  should  be  presented  to  the  mind  in  an  unusual 
aspect."  "There  will  also  be  found  in  these  pieces  little  of 
what  is  usually  called  poetic  diction;  as  much  pains  has  been 
taken  to  avoid  it  as  is  ordinarily  taken  to  produce  it."  "The 
language  of  a  very  large  portion  of  every  good  poem,  even  of 
the  most  elevated  character,  must  necessarily,  except  with 
reference  to  the  metre,  in  no  respect  differ  from  that  of  good 
prose."  "It  may  be  safely  affirmed,  that  there  neither  is,  nor 
can  be,  any  essential  difference  between  the  language  of  pros^ 
and  metrical  composition," 


130  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

Translated  into  practice,  these  theories  resulted 
in  such  compositions  as  the  ballad  of  "The  Idiot 
Boy,"  the  true  story  of  "Goody  Blake  and  Harry 
Gill,"  and  such  descriptions  as  this  of  Simon  Lee, 
the  old  huntsman: 

"But,  oh  the  heavy  change! — bereft 
Of  health,  strength,  friends,  and  kindred,  seel 
Old  Simon  to  the  world  is  left 
In  liveried  poverty. 
His  Master's  dead, — and  no  one  now 
Dwells  in  the  Hall  of  Ivor; 
Men,  dogs,  and  horses,  all  are  dead; 
He  is  the  sole  survivor. 

"And  he  is  lean  and  he  is  sick; 
His  body,  dwindled  and  awry. 
Rests  upon  ankles  swoln  and  thick; 
His  legs  are  thin  and  dry. 
One  prop  he  has,  and  only  one, 
His  wife,  an  aged  woman, 
Lives  with  him,  near  the  waterfall. 
Upon  the  village  Common." 

Such  verses  as  these  offered  fair  game  to  the  critic, 
and  such  propositions  as  have  just  been  quoted  were 
so  subversive  of  all  literary  traditions  that  it  is 
easy  to  understand  with  what  vehemence  they  were 
assailed  and  with  what  energy  they  were  repudiated. 
Removed  to  the  vantage  point  of  a  century's  dis- 
tance, we  can  see  easily  enough  that.  Wordsworth 
went  too  far  in  his  revolt  against  the  artificial,  and 
that  he  was  altogether  too  uncompromising  in  the 
practical  application  of  his  theories.  'It  has  be- 
come, indeed,  the  veriest  commonplace  of  criticism 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  131 

to  say  that  Wordsworth  was  a  great  poet  in  spite  of 
his  theories,  and  that  he  was  greatest  when  he  ignored 
them  most  completely.;  How  fully  this  fact  was  also 
recognised  by  his  contemporaries,  even  by  the  most 
intimate  of  his  friends,  we  may  read  in  the  "Bio- 
graphia  Literaria"  of  Coleridge.  But  if  we  wish  to 
do  entire  justice  to  the  "Lyrical  Ballads,"  and  to 
the  famous  Preface  which  appeared  with  their  sec- 
ond edition,  we  must  do  more  than  single  out  such 
points  of  attack  as  are  obvious  to  the  most  casual 
observer.  jThe  Preface  in  question,  taken  as  a  whole, 
is  one  of  the  most  important  contributions  ever  made 
to  literary  criticism.'  It  is  important,  not  merely 
on  account  of  its  h^jp.rical  position,  but  on  account 
of_its  insight  and  its  fundamental  sanity.  Let  us 
quote,  as  ah  offset  to  the  passages  which  are  popu- 
larly taken  to  sum  up  the  writer's  message,  some 
of  his  sayings  that  have  deep  and  lasting  value.  He 
tells  us  that  he  would  not  have  undertaken  his  cru- 
sade against  the  prevailing  literary  tendencies  of 
his  age  had  it  not  been  for  "a  deep  impression  of 
certain  inherent  and  indestructible  qualities  of  the 
human  mind,  and  likewise  of  certain  powers  in  the 
great  and  permanent  objects  that  act  upon  it,  which 
are  equally  inherent  and  indestructible."  To  the 
question,  "What  is  a  Poet?"  this  answer  is  given: 

"He  is  a  man  speaking  to  men:  a  man,  it  is  true,  endowed  with 
more  lively  sensibility,  more  enthusiasm  and  tenderness,  who 
has  a  greater  knowledge  of  human  nature,  and  a  more  com- 
prehensive soul,  than  are  supposed  to  be  common  among  man- 


132  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

kind;  a  man  pleased  with  his  own  passions  and  volitions,  and 
who  rejoices  more  than  other  men  in  the  spirit  of  life  that  is 
in  him;  delighting  to  contemplate  similar  volitions  and  pas- 
sions as  manifested  in  the  goings-on  of  the  Universe,  and 
habituaUy  impelled  to  create  them  where  he  does  not  find  them." 

Contrasting  poetry  with  science,  he  says : 

I  "Tlie  man  of  science  seeks  truth  as  a  remote  and  unknown 
benefactor;  he  cherishes  and  loves  it  in  his  solitude:  the  Poet, 
singing  a  song  in  which  all  human  beings  join  with  him,  re- 
joices in  the  presence  of  truth  as  our  visible  friend  and  hourly 
companion.  Poetry  is  the  breath  and  finer  spirit  of  all  knowl- 
edge; it  is  the  impassioned  expression  which  is  in  the  counte- 
nance of  all  Science.  Emphatically  may  it  be  said  of  the  Poet, 
as  Shakespeare  hath  said  of  man,  that  he  looks  before  and 
after.  He  is  the  rock  of  defense  of  human  nature;  and  up- 
holder and  preserver,  carrying  everj^^here  with  him  relation- 
ship and  love.  In  spite  of  difference  of  soil  and  climate,  of 
language  and  manners,  of  laws  and  customs,  in  spite  of  things 
silently  gone  out  of  mind,  and  things  violently  destroyed,  the 
Poet  binds  together  by  passion  and  knowledge  the  vast  empire 
of  human  society,  as  it  is  spread  over  the  whole  earth,  and 
over  all  time.  .  .  .  t'oetry  is  the  first  and  last  of  all  knowl- 
edge— it  is  as  immortal  as  the  heart  of  man." 

Turning  now  to  the  "Lyrical  Ballads"  themselves 
and  assuming  an  attitude  of  sympathy  rather  than 
of  opposition,  it  is  not  difficult  to  find  even  in  those 
early  verses  many  passages  of  that  rare  and  ex- 
quisite beauty  which  all  lovers  of  English  poetry 
associate  with  the  name  of  Wordsworth.  Even  "The 
Thorn,"  in  which  we  are  told  how  Martha  Ray 

"Gave  vnth  a  maiden's  true  good-will 
Her  company  to  Stephen  Hill," 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  2^3 

yields  such  words  as  these : 

"At  all  times  of  the  day  and  night 
This  wretched  Woman  thither  goes; 
And  she  is  known  to  every  star. 
And  erery  wind  that  blows." 

The  last  two  lines  of  this  passage  illustrate,  thus 
early  in  the  poet's  career,  what  Mr.  Swinburne  calls 
"the  wonderful  touch  and  flash  of  poetic  imagina- 
tion which  all  Wordsworth's  intense  and  concentrated 
self-will  could  not  enable  him  utterly  to  suppress 
or  persistently  to  subdue."  Such  flashes  of  imagina- 
'  tion,  brightening  the  most  prosaic  tracts  of  Words- 
/^MV^orth's  verse,  go  far  to  redeem  it  from  the  reproach 
mmm  of  trivial  garrulity,  and  when  they  gleam  upon  our 
vision,  we  feel  richly  repaid  for  our  patient  search. 
And  the  "Lines  Composed  a  Few  Miles  above  Tintern 
Abbey,"  which  also  belongs  to  the  collection  of  the 
"Lyrical  Ballads,"  is  a  poem  so  Wordsworthian  in 
the  best  sense  that  the  critic  who  could  find  in  that 
collection  no  promise  of  a  new  dawn  for  English 
poetry  must  have  been  blind  indeed.  The  mood  of 
those  verses  may  have  been  felt  by  others  before 
Wordsworth,  but  he  was  the  first  to  give  it  ex- 
pression— 

"That  blessed  mood, 
In  which  the  burthen  of  the  mystery, 
In  which  the  heavy  and  the  weary  weight 
Of  all  this  unintelligible  world. 
Is  lightened: — that  serene  and  blessed  mood 
In  which  the  affections  gently  lead  us  on, — 
Until,  the  breath  of  this  corporeal  frame 

( 


1%^^  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

And  even  the  motion  of  our  human  blood 
Almost  suspended,  we  are  laid  asleep 
In  body,  and  become  a  living  soul: 
While  with  an  eye  made  quiet  by  the  power 
Of  harmony,  and  the  deep  power  of  joy, 
We  see  into  the  life  of  things." 

The  poet,  thus  revisiting  the  scenes  familiar  in  earlier 
years,  falls  into  this  mood,  and  it  prompts  him  to 
grave  reflection. 

"For  I  have  learned 
To  look  on  nature,  not  as  in  the  hour 
Of  thoughtless  youth;  but  hearing  oftentimes 
The  still,  sad  music  of  humanity. 
Nor  harsh  nor  grating,  though  of  ample  power 
To  chasten  and  subdue.     And  I  have  felt 
A  presence  that  disturbs  me  with  the  joy 
Of  elevated  thoughts;  a  sense  sublime 
Of  something  far  more  deeply  interfused. 
Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  suns. 
And  the  round  ocean  and  the  living  air. 
And  the  blue  sky,  and  in  the  mind  of  man: 
A  motion  and  a  spirit,  that  impels 
All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thought. 
And  rolls  through  all  things." 

'  The  "blessed  mood"  of  which  Wordsworth  speaks 
in  the  lines  above  quoted,  the  "serene  and  blessed 
mood"  of  a  contemplative  quietism  which  takes  com- 
plete possession  of  the  spirit,  and  fills  it  with  the 
deep  sense  of  the  harmony  existing  between  nature 
and  the  human  soul,  was  destined  to  become  the  pre- 
vailing mood  of  the  poet's  manhood  and  old  age, 
and  the  power  to  impart  that  mood  to  others  is  the 
secret  of  Wordsworth^    Yet  this  mood,  although  the 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  135 

inevitable  outcome  of  his  mistical  imagination  and 
philosophical  temper,  was  not  easily  attained,  and  for 
a  number  of  years  had  to  struggle  with  the  rebellious 
mood  which  was  nurtured  by  the  revolutionary  influ- 
ences that  shaped  later  eighteenth-century  thought. 
Lowell  seemed  to  think  that  Wordsworth  became  a 
conservative  through  intellectual  conviction,  and  re- 
tained "to  the  last  a  certain  radicalism  of  tempera- 
ment and  instinct."  I  am  rather  inclined  to  believe 
that  fEe  was  a  conservative  by  natural  bent,  and 
that  whatever  radicalism  he  retained  was  the  product 
of  intellectual  conviction.  It  must,  of  course,  be 
remembered  that  Wordsworth,  like  Coleridge  and 
Landor,  belonged  to  the  earlier  generation  of  the 
poets  who  felt  the  influence  of  the  Revolution.  It 
must  also  be  remembered  that  he  was  not  content 
to  feel  the  influence  from  afar,  but  that  he  visited 
the  scenes  and  came  into  close  relations  with  some 
of  the  actors  in  the  great  revolutionary  drama.  At 
the  age  of  twenty  he  made  his  first  visit  to  France, 
but  this  was  a  very  brief  one,  and  may  be  passed  over 
as  comparatively  unimportant.  A  year  later,  in 
the  autumn  of  1791,  he  again  crossed  the  silver 
streak  that  separates  France  from  England,  and 
passed  through  Paris  to  Blois,  where  he  remained 
for  a  year,  and  set  himself  to  study  both  the  language 
and  the  social  situation.  Here  he  made  the  intimate 
acquaintance  of  Michel  Beaupuy,  an  aristocrat  with 
revolutionary  sympathies,  a  man  about  fifteen  years 
his  senior.     Professor  Dowden  describes  this  man, 


1S6  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

who  exercised  a  powerful  influence  over  the  young 
poet,  as  "of  most  engaging  person,  a  thinker  as  well 
as  a  soldier,  a  man  of  the  purest  morals,  one  who 
had  something  of  antique  virtue  united  with  a  modern 
enthusiasm,  one  to  whom  the  humanitarian  behefs  had 
the  force  of  a  religion."  This  man  made  Words- 
worth understand  the  real  meaning  of  the  Revolution. 
He  was  less  influenced,  however,  by  the  theoretical 
discussions  of  the  French  philosophers  than  by  the 
actual  incidents  that  came  under  his  observation,  and 
by  the  pure  and  glowing  sentiment  of  the  people 
with  whom  he  came  in  contact.  "'Tis  against  that 
that  we  are  fighting,"  said  his  friend  and  mentor  one 
day,  pointing  to  a  little  peasant  girl  made  thin  and 
pale  by  unremitting  toil.  Wordsworth  visited  Paris 
again  just  after  the  September  massacres  of  1792, 
and  thought  seriously  of  devoting  himself  heart  and 
soul  to  the  French  patriot  cause.  It  was  then  that 
the  full  tide  of  enthusiasm  rose  and  well-nigh  swept 
him  away  from  his  moorings,  it  was  of  that  time  that 
he  could  say: 

"Bliss  was  it  in  that  dawn  to  be  alive. 
But  to  be  young  was  very  heaven." 

It  was  of  that  period  that  he  afterwards  wrote  in 
"The  Prelude": 


r 


'In  the  People  was  my  trust: 
And  in  the  virtues  which  mine  eyes  had  seen, 
I  knew  that  wound  external  could  not  take 
Life  from  the  young  Repubhc;  that  new  foes 
Would  only  follow,  in  the  path  of  shame. 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  137 

Their  brethren,  and  her  triumphs  be  in  the  end 

Great,  universal,  irresistible. 

This  intuition  led  me  to  confound 

One  victory  with  another,  higher  far, — 

Triumphs  of  unambitious  peace  at  home, 

And  noiseless  fortitude."  ^ 

Of  the  three  books  of  "The  Prelude"  which  contain 
the  poet's  spiritual  autobiography  during  his  French 
sojourn,  Mr.  John  Morley,  comparing  them  with  the 
dithyrambic  utterance  of  such,  .^wjiters  as  Carlyle, 
Michelet,  and  Hugo,  declares :  rBy  their  strenuous 
simplicity,  their  deep  truthfulness,  their  slowfooted 
and  inexorable  transition  from  ardent  hope  to  dark 
imaginations,  sense  of  woes  to  come,  sorrow  for 
human  kind,  and  pain  of  heart,  they  breathe  the  very 
spirit  of  the  great  catastrophe.  .  .  .  The  story  of 
these  three  books  has  something  of  the  severity,  the 
self-control,  the  inexorable  necessity  of  classic  trag- 
edy, and  like  classic  tragedy  it  has  a  noble  end.^ 
Wordsworth's  impassioned  advocacy  of  the  French 
Revolution  found  a  remarkable  expression  in  prose 
during  the  year  of  his  return  to  England.  The 
Bishop  of  LlandafF  had  condemned  the  Revolution  in 
the  most  approved  language  of  Tory  conservatism, 
and  the  sermon  in  which  his  Lordship's  reactionary 
opinions  were  set  forth  evoked  from  Wordsworth  that 
Letter  which  remains  one  of  the  most  instructive  of 
all  his  writings.  "Have  3'^ou  so  little  knowledge  of 
the  nature  of  man,"  he  asks  the  Bishop, 

"as  to  be  ignorant  that  a  time  of  revolution  is  not  the  season 
of  true  Liberty?    Alas,  the  obstinacy  and  perversion  of  man 


138  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

is  such  that  she  is  too  often  obliged  to  borrow  the  very  arms 
of  Despotism  to  overthrow  him,  and,  in  order  to  reign  in  peace, 
must  establish  herself  by  violence.  She  deplores  such  stern 
necessity,  but  the  safety  of  the  people,  her  supreme  law,  is  her 
consolation.  This  apparent  contradiction  between  the  principles 
of  liberty  and  the  march  of  revolutions;  this  spirit  of  jealousy, 
of  severity,  of  disquietude,  of  vexation  indispensable  from  a 
state  of  war  between  the  oppressors  and  oppressed,  must  of 
necessity  confuse  the  ideas  of  morality,  and  contract  the  benign 
exertion  of  the  best  affections  of  the  human  heart.  Political 
virtues  are  developed  at  the  expense  of  moral  ones;  and  the 
sweet  emotions  of  compassion,  e\-idently  dangerous  when 
traitors  are  to  be  punished,  are  too  often  altogether  smothered. 
But  is  this  a  suflBcient  reason  to  reprobate  a  convulsion  from 
which  is  to  spring  a  fairer  order  of  things?  It  is  the  province 
of  education  to  rectify  the  erroneous  notion  which  a  habit  of 
oppression,  and  even  of  resistance  may  have  created,  and  to 
soften  this  ferocity  of  character,  proceeding  from  a  necessary 
suspension  of  the  mild  and  social  virtues;  it  belongs  to  her  to 
create  a  race  of  men  who,  truly  free,  will  look  upon  their 
fathers  as  only  enfranchised." 

Shelley  might  have  written  this,  as  he  might  have 
written  the  philosophical  defence  of  republicanism 
that  follows.  "My  grand  objection  to  monarchy," 
Wordsworth  goes  on  to  say,  "is  drawn  from  the 
ETEENAL  NATURE  OF  MAN.  The  office  of  king  is  a 
trial  to  which  human  virtue  is  not  equal.  Pure  and 
universal  representation,  by  which  alone  liberty  can 
be  secured,  cannot,  I  think,  exist  together  with 
monarchy."  It  is  melancholy  to  reflect  that  the  man 
who  penned  these  incontestable  truths  in  1793  should 
have  become  in  1832  the  violent  opponent  of  the 
Reform  Bill. 
\  We  all  know  how  Wordsworth,  like  his  friend  Cole- 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  139 

ridge,  lost  the  faith  of  those  early  years  and  became 
the  enemy  of  all  revolutionary  movements,  the  cham- 
pion of  all  established  institutions.  The  immediate 
cause  of  this  revulsion  of  feeling  was  much  the  same 
in  both  cases.  The  declaration  of  war  between 
France  and  England  imposed  a  violent  strain  upon 
the" patriotism  of  both  poets;  they  felt  that  their 
country  deserved  chastisement  for  its  manifold  sins, 
yet  they  could  not  altogether  make  common  cause 
with  the  national  enemy.  Then  came  the  attack  of 
the  French  armies  upon  the  very  principles  of  that 
liberty  which  they  had  been  raised  to  defend,  and 
the  spirit  of  the  Revolution  became  transformed 
into  the  spirit  of  aggression,  of  conquest,  of  the 
intoxication  of  military  glory.  :  To  the  France  that 
had  stood  alone  as  the  champion  of  liberty,  and  held 
the  aUied  monarchies  of  Europe  at  bay,  there  suc- 
ceeded the  France  that  sought  only  for  aggrandise- 
ment, and  for  a  score  of  years  made  the  Continent 
one  battlefield  of  needless  and  wanton  warfare. 
Napoleonic  France  became  as  depressing  a  spectacle 
to  the  lovers  of  liberty  as  Republican  France  had 
been  an  inspiring  one  ;|  both  Wordsworth  and  Cole- 
ridge found  themselves  compelled  by  the  inexorable 
logic  of  events,  to  forswear  their  old  allegiance,  and  to 
denounce  what  they  had  hitherto  extolled^  For  both 
poets  the  experience  was  a  bitter  one,  'endured  with 
deep  anguish  of  soul,  but  both  at  last  found  a  sort 
of  refuge  in  the  contemplative  life  and  the  ministry 
of  a  mysticism  of  which  they  were  by  nature  pecu- 


140  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

liarly  inclined  to  be  receptive.  In  the  case  of  Words- 
worth, it  is  possible  to  take  a  harsh  view  of  his  de- 
sertion from  the  republican  camp,  but  it  is  also  pos- 
sible to  take  a  sympathetic  view.  Nothing  could  be 
more  unfair  than  the  appHcation  to  him,  without 
many  qualifications,  of  the  familiar  lines: 

"Just  for  a  handful  of  silver  he  left  us. 
Just  for  a  riband  to  stick  in  his  coat." 

Yet  in  spite  of  all  disclaimers,  it  remains  true,  upon 
Browning's  own  admission,  that  Wordsworth  was 
in  the  mind  of  the  poet  when  he  wrote  "The  Lost 
Leader."  When  the  question  direct  was  put  to 
Browning  thirty  years  later,  he  said: 

"I  can  only  answer,  with  something  of  shame  and  contrition, 
that  I  undoubtedly  had  Wordsworth  in  my  mind — but  simply 
as  a  model;  you  know  an  artist  takes  one  or  two  striking 
traits  in  the  features  of  his  model  and  uses  them  to  start  his 
fancy  on  a  flight  which  may  end  far  enough  from  the  good 
man  or  woman  who  happens  to  be  sitting  for  nose  and  eye.  I 
thought  of  the  great  Poet's  abandonment  of  liberalism  at  an 
unlucky  juncture,  and  no  repaying  consequence  that  I  could 
ever  see.  But  once  call  my  fancy  portrait  Wordsworth — and 
how  much  more  ought  one  to  say!" 

Much  more,  indeed,  and  voices  have  not  been  want- 
ing to  say  it.  But  in  spite  of  all  that  is  to  be  urged 
in  extenuation  of  Wordsworth's  change  of  attitude, 
he  undoubtedly  became  a  lost  leader:  that  is,  a  lost 
leader  of  the  forces  that  were  making  for  one  form 
of  social  regeneration,  and  had  reason  to  count  upon 
his  support. 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  141 

"We  that  had  loved  him  so,  followed  him,  honoured  him, 

Lived  in  his  mild  and  magnificent  eye, 
Learned  his  great  language,  caught  his  clear  accents. 

Made  him  our  pattern  to  live  and  to  die! 
Shakespeare  was  of  us,  Milton  was  for  us. 

Burns,  Shelley,  were  with  us— they  watch  from  their  graves ! 
He  alone  breaks  from  the  van  and  the  freemen, 

He  alone  sinks  to  the  rear  and  the  slaves !" 

|What  the  Wordsworthians  claim  is,  of  course,  that 
their  poet  became  a  truer  worker  in  the  cause  of  ad- 
vancing humanity  when  he  turned  his  gaze  away  from 
external  X£TJ?lution  s ,  and^  Ji^dT^t  upon  the3eep^ 
springs  of  the  inner  life.  It  became  his  mission  to 
stir  "the  depth  and  not  the  tumult  of  the  soul,' J  a 
phrase  which  marks  perfectly  the  distinction  between 
Wordsworthianism  and  Byronism.  The  sympathetic 
view  of  his  course,  which  we  may  adopt  without 
lessening  our  regret  at  his  abandonment  of  liberalism, 
is  expressed  by  Mr.  John  Morley.  fThe  French 
Revolution  made  the  one  crisis  in  Wordsworth's  men- 
tal history,  the  one  heavy  assault  on  his  continence 
of  soul,  and  wlien  he  emerged  from  it  all  his  great- 
ness remained  to  him.  After  a  long  spell  of  bewilder- 
ment, mortification,  and  sore  disappointment,  the 
old  faith  in  new  shapes  was  given  back."     In  the 

poet's  own  words,  y^^ 

■1  "Nature's  self, 
By  all  varieties  of  human  love       I  _     ^^  ^ 


v^ 


Assisted,  led  me  back  through  opening  day 
To  those  sweet  counsels  between  head  and  heart  ,    ^^ 

Whence  grew  that  genuhiejknowled^e,  fraught  with  peace,  "^^^ 
Which,  through  the  later  sinkings  of  this  cause,  A   '"^ . 

Hath  still  upheld  me  and  upholds  me  now."  t 


U^' 


V^ 


142  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

Wordsworth  was  about  thirty  years  of  age  when 
he  learned  the  true  direction  of  his  genius,  and  ac- 
quired the  abiding  consciousness  of  his  powers.  When 
he  took  up  his  residence  in  the  Grasmere  vale  at 
the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century,  his  time  of  storm 
and  stress  was  over,  and  his  external  history,  as  far 
as  noteworthy  events  were  concerned,  had  come  to 
an  end.  It  is  true  that  his  marriage  came  a  little 
later,  that  he  made  long  journeys  abroad  during 
the  ensuing  year,  that  in  1839  he  took  an  honorary 
degree  at  Oxford,  and  that  in  1843  he  succeeded 
Southey  as  Poet  Laureate.  But  these  happenings, 
and  others,  had  little  effect  upon  the  tranquil  tenor 
of  his  existence.  The  Grasmere  period  of  his  life 
covered  a  full  half-century,  and  it  was  a  period  of 
almost  unbroken  communion  with  himself  and  with 
the  few  who  were  gathered  about  him  in  personal 
relationship.  Few  men  have  lived  so  apart  from  the 
world  as  Wordsworth  lived  during  the  last  fifty  years 
of  his  life.  As  thinker  and  poet  he  stood  strangely 
alone.  In  the  ideals  which  he  was  seeking  to  realise 
he  had  no  predecessors,  unless  we  make  a  possible 
exception  of  Cowper ;  of  his  contemporaries,  although 
some  slight  degree  of  kinship  with  him  may  be  claimed 
for  Crabbe,  Coleridge  alone  stood  really  close  to  him. 
He  grew  more  and  more  self-contained  as  the  years 
went  on,  more  and  more  uninfluenced  by  ideas  that 
were  not  the  product  of  his  own  philosophy  of  nature 
and  of  man.  Under  such  self-imposed  limitations 
the   master   is   first    revealed,   we   are   reminded  by 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  143 

Goethe,  and  intellectual  freedom  comes  only  with  full 
submission  to  the  law  of  our  being.  If  this  figure  of 
Wordsworth  the  recluse  has  its  unpleasant  features, 
if  his  self -absorption  seems  at  times  too  pronounced, 
if  we  are  repelled  by  his  attitude  toward  his  con- 
temporaries and  by  his  lack  of  the  sympathy  which 
accords  generous  appreciation  to  the  work  of  others, 
we  should  bear  in  mind  that  his  genius  required  just 
this  concentration  upon  itself  to  achieve  its  char- 
acteristic expression.  We  must  admit  that  he  did 
not  have  the  open  mind,  but  we  are  also  constrained 
to  believe  that  his  original  and  peculiar  powers 
would  have  become  dissipated,  would  have  failed  in 
their  effective  development,  had  he  forced  his  mind 
into  that  receptive  attitude  which  brings  to  minds  of 
a  different  type  their  best  inspiration.  No  poet  ever 
gored  his  own  thoughts  more  persistently  than  did 
Wordsworth,  and  the  result  of  this  unremitting  in- 
trospection was  that  body  of  work  which,  allowing 
for  all  that  may  be  set  aside  as  commonplace  and 
uninspired,  remains  one  of  the  lasting  intellectual 
forces  of  the  past  century. 

It  must  not  be  thought,  because  Wordsworth  thus 
withdrew  himself  from  the  world,  that  he  became 
indifferent  to  the  political  and  social  evolution  of 
his  age.  On  the  contrary,  he  kept  himself  well  in- 
formed concerning  public  affairs,  and  was  intently 
observant  of  the  whole  historical  drama  that  ended 
with  Waterloo,  leaving  Europe  free  to  breathe  once 
more,    and   making   it   possible   to    reconstruct   the 


144  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

civilisation  that  had  been  ravaged  by  twenty-five 
years  of  warfare.  Take  the  sonnets  dedicated  "To 
Liberty,"  for  example,  and  note  how  the  poet  seizes 
upon  every  occasion  offered  by  passing  events  to 
set  forth  his  exalted  and  chastened  conception  of 
that  most  precious  birthright  of  the  spirit  of  man. 
"These  sonnets,"  says  Frederic  Myers,  "are  worthy 
of  comparison  with  the  noblest  passages  of  patriotic 
verse  or  prose  which  all  our  history  has  inspired — 
the  passages  where  Shakespeare  brings  his  rays  to 
focus  on  'this  earth,  this  realm,  this  England' — or 
where  the  dread  of  national  dishonour  has  kindled 
Chatham  to  an  iron  glow — or  where  Milton  rises 
from  the  polemic  into  the  prophet,  and  Burke  from 
the  partisan  into  the  philosopher."  Liberty,  in 
Wordsworth's  conception,  is  a  thing 

"Not  to  be  given 
By  all  the  blended  powers  of  Earth  and  Heaven;** 

no  external  arrangements  can  bestow  it  upon  a  peo- 
ple or  upon  an  individual ;  a  people  must  conquer  it,        J 
and  first  be  worthy  to  conquer  it;  an  individual  must)(''^^ 
struggle  for  it  in  his  own  soul,  defending  his  soul 
as  a  citadel  against  the  invader. 

"There  is  a  bondage  v/orse,  far  worse,  to  bear 
Than  his  who  breathes,  by  roof,  and  floor,  and  wall. 
Pent  in,  a  tyrant's  solitary  Thrall: 
'Tis  his  who  walks  about  in  the  open  air, 
One  of  a  Nation  who,  henceforth,  must  wear 
Their  fetters  in  their  souls.    For  who  could  be, 
Who,  even  the  best,  in  such  condition,  free. 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  145 

From  self-reproach,  reproach  that  he  must  share 
With  Human-nature?    Never  be  it  ours 
To  see  the  sun  how  brightly  it  will  shine. 
And  know  that  noble  feelings,  manly  powers. 
Instead  of  gathering  strength,  must  droop  and  pine; 
And  earth  with  all  her  pleasant  fruits  and  flowers 
Fade,  and  participate  in  man's  decline." 

No  phase  of  the  struggle  against  Napoleon 
escaped  the  attention  of  this  vigilant  poet,  and, 
whether  his  utterances  take  the  direct  form  of  per- 
sonal tributes  to  the  heroes  of  that  struggle — Schill, 
Hofer,  Toussaint,  Palafox, — whether  they  celebrate 
such  immediate  events  as  the  subjugation  of  Switzer- 
land, the  siege  of  Zaragoza,  the  destruction  of  Mos- 
cow, and  the  battle  of  Waterloo,  or  whether  they 
praise  by  indirection  the  valour  of  the  present  by 
recalling  the  valour  of  the  past,  they  are  inspired 
by  the  same  stern  indignation,  and  the  same  passion- 
ate endeavour  to  strip  the  ideal  of  freedom  from 
all  its  ignoble  accidental  associations,  and  to  enforce 
its  deep  spiritual  significance.  The  heroic  struggle 
of  the  Spaniards  against  Napoleon  enlisted  Words- 
worth's sympathies,  as  they  did  those  of  Landor, 
more,  perhaps,  than  any  other  phase  of  the  conflict 
upon  the  Continent.  "There  is  not  a  man  in  these 
Islands,"  he  says,  "who  is  not  convinced  that  the 
cause  of  Spain  is  the  most  righteous  cause  in  which, 
since  the  opposition  of  the  Greek  RepubHcs  to  the 
Persian  Invader  at  Thermopylae  and  Marathon, 
sword  ever  was  drawn."  The  sonnet  upon  the  "In- 
dignation of  a  High-Minded  Spaniard"  affords   a 


146  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

particularly  good  illustration  of  Wordsworth's  in- 
tense feeling  upon  this  subject. 

*'We  can  endure  that  he  should  waste  our  lands. 
Despoil  our  temples,  and  by  sword  and  flame 
Return  us  to  the  dust  from  which  we  came ; 
Such  food  a  Tyrant's  appetite  demands: 
And  we  can  brook  the  thought  that  by  his  hands 
Spain  may  be  overpowered,  and  he  possess. 
For  his  delight,  a  solemn  wilderness 
Where  all  the  brave  lie  dead.     But,  when  of  bands 
Which  he  will  break  for  us  he  dares  to  speak. 
Of  benefits,  and  of  a  future  day 
When  our  enlightened  minds  shall  bless  his  sway; 
Then,  the  strained  heart  of  fortitude  proves  weak: 
Our  groans,  our  blushes,  our  pale  cheeks  declare 
That  he  has  power  to  inflict  what  we  lack  strength  to  bear." 

This  commentary  upon  the  hypocrisies  of  interna- 
tional politics  has  its  application  to  many  other 
situations,  both  ancient  and  modem,  besides  the  one 
for  which  it  was  written.  The  pamphlet  upon  the 
Convention  of  Cintra,  which  is  the  most  important  of 
Wordsworth's  prose  writings,  provides  us  with  the 
fullest  expression  of  his  political  philosophy  as  that 
philosophy  took  shape  from  the  pressure  of  events  in 
France  and  Spain.  The  very  title  of  the  pamphlet  is 
eloquent.  It  reads:  "Concerning  the  relations  of 
Great  Britain,  Spain,  and  Portugal,  to  each  other, 
and  to  the  common  enemy,  at  this  crisis ;  and  specific- 
ally as  affected  by  the  Convention  of  Cintra:  the 
whole  brought  to  the  test  of  those  principles  by  which 
alone  the  independence  and  freedom  of  nations  can 
be  preserved  or  recovered."     The  Convention  which 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  147 

occasioned  this  pamphlet  does  not  seem,  in  our  modern 
perspective,  as  important  as  it  seemed  to  Words- 
worth. Events  succeeded  one  another  rapidly  in 
those  days,  and  the  agreement  of  Cintra  was  already 
half-forgotten  when  the  pamphlet  appeared.  The 
agreement  provided,  in  substance,  that  the  French 
should  retreat  from  Spain  upon  terms  far  more 
favourable  than  they  deserved,  terms  which  out- 
raged the  sensibilities  of  the  people  whose  soil  had 
suffered  so  wanton  an  invasion.  A  righteous  cause 
was  at  the  very  point  of  triumph,  and  the  best  fruits 
of  the  victory  were  suddenly  snatched  away.  It 
was  a  compromise  where  compromise  meant  the  de- 
sertion of  principle,  and  upon  Wordsworth  it  pro- 
duced an  effect  not  unlike  that  which  was  to  be 
produced  upon  Mrs.  Browning  half  a  century  later 
by  the  news  of  Villaf  ranca.  But  if  the  Convention  of 
Cintra  no  longer  occupies  a  conspicuous  place  among 
the  happenings  of  the  Napoleonic  period,  the  pam- 
phlet which  Wordsworth  devoted  to  its  discussion  re- 
mains a  permanent  contribution  to  English  4>oliticaI 
literature.  Canning  called  it  "the  finest  piece  of 
political  eloquence  which  had  appeared  since  Burke," 
and  Professor  Dowden  reaffirms  this  judgment.  I 
must  find  space  for  at  least  one  impressive  passage. 

"I  have  announced  the  feelings  of  those  who  hope:  yet  one 
word  more  to  those  who  despond.  And  first;  he  stands  upon  a 
hideous  precipice  (and  it  will  be  the  same  with  all  who  may 
succeed  to  him  and  his  iron  sceptre) — he  who  has  outlawed 
himself  from  society  by  proclaiming,  with  word  and  act,  that 
he  acknowledges  no  mastery  but  power.     This  truth  must  be 


148  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

evident  to  all  who  breathe — from  the  dawn  of  childhood,  till 
the  last  gleam  of  twilight  is  lost  in  the  darkness  of  dotage. 
But  take  the  tyrant  as  he  is,  in  the  plenitude  of  his  supposed 
strength.  The  vast  country  of  Germany,  in  spite  of  the  rusty 
but  too  strong  fetters  of  corrupt  princedoms  and  degenerate 
nobility, — Germany — with  its  citizens,  its  peasants,  and  its 
philosophers — will  not  lie  quiet  under  the  weight  of  injuries 
which  has  been  heaped  upon  it.  There  is  a  sleep,  but  no  death, 
among  the  mountains  of  Switzerland.  Florence,  and  Venice, 
and  Genoa,  and  Rome, — have  their  own  poignant  recollections, 
and  a  majestic  train  of  glory  in  past  ages.  The  stir  of  emanci- 
pation may  again  be  felt  at  the  mouths  as  weU  as  at  the  sources 
of  the  Rhine.  Poland  perhaps  will  not  be  insensible;  Kosciusko 
and  his  compeers  may  not  have  bled  in  vain.  ,Nor  is  Hun- 
garian loyalty  to  be  overlooked.  And,  for  Spain  itself,  the 
territory'  is  wide:  let  it  be  overrun:  the  torrent  will  weaken  as 
the  torrent  spreads.  And,  should  all  resistance  disappear,  be 
not  daunted:  Extremes  meet:  and  how  often  do  hope  and 
despair  almost  touch  each  other — though  unconscious  of  their 
neighbourhood,  because  their  faces  are  turned  different  ways! 
Yet,  in  a  moment,  the  one  shall  vanish  j  and  the  other  begin  a 
career  in  the  fulness  of  her  joy." 

The  calm  conviction  here, expressed  of  the  mori^  order 

of  the  world  has  made  many  despondent  observers 
take  heart  anew,  may,  perhaps,  help  us  to  take  heart 
amid  the  dark  perplexities  of  our  own  time.  J  To  be 
read  in  connection  with  this  tractate,  because  com- 
plementary to  it,  are  the  sonnets  written  at  the  same 
time  and  with  the  same  inspiration. 

"The  power  of  Armies  is  a  visible  thing, 
Formal,  and  circumscribed  in  time  and  space; 
But  who  the  limits  of  that  power  shall  trace 
Which  a  brave  People  into  light  can  bring 
Or  hide,  at  will — for  freedom  combating 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  149 

By  just  revenge  inflamed ?   No  foot  may  chase. 
No  eye  can  follow,  to  a  fatal  place 
That  power,  that  spirit,  whether  on  the  wing 
Like  the  strong  wind,  or  sleeping  like  the  wind 
Within  its  awful  caves." 

With  the  close  of  the  long  war,  Wordsworth's  politi- 
cal poems  came  to  an  end.  The  sonnet^ave  place  to 
the  ode,  and  the  day  of  a  general  national  thanks- 
giving, appointed  early  in  1816,  was  hailed  in  an 
outburst  of  memorable  song, 

"For  tyranny  subdued. 
And  for  the  sway  of  equity  renewed. 
For  liberty  confirmed,  and  peace  restored  I" 

Professor  Dowden  says:  "Not  by  force  of  mortal 
arms  had  the  triumph  been  achieved,  but  by  the  might 
of  a  righteous  cause ;  by  the  soul  of  a  nation ;  and 
by  the  divine  wrath  against  the  tyrant,  the  divine 
pity  for  the  oppressed,  which  breathed  through  the 
spirit  of  a  people  who  did  not  shrink  from  sacrifice 
or  death.  The  temper  of  these  poems  is  higher  than 
ethical ;  it  is,  in  the  truest  sense,  religious :  there  is  a 
breadth  and  majesty  in  the  versification  which  corre- 
;sponds  with  the  sublimity  of  the  occasion." 

Wordsworth  is  rightly  reckoned  among  the  great 
religious  poets,  for  no  modern  singer  has  made  a 
stronger  appeal  to  the  religious  emotions.  He  allies 
those  emotions,  on  the  one  hand,  with  the^  deepest  of 
patriotic  feeling,  and  on  the  other,  with  that  form 
of  worship  which  becomes  associated  with  the  con- 


150  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

templation  of  nature,  and  of  which  he  is  the  chief 
priest  of  our  modern  age.  There  is,  however,  one 
point  of  view  from  which  his  rehgious  views  do  not 
appear  in  an  attractive  light.  As  an  opponent  of 
Cathohc  emancipation  he  is  not  a  sympathetic  figure, 
and  the  long  series  of  discussions  comprised  within 
the  "Ecclesiastical  Sonnets"  are  arid  rather  than  in- 
spiring. As  Mr.  Morley  tersely  remarks,  these  son- 
nets are  ecclesiastical,  not  religious.  Myers  says 
the  same  thing  less  tersely  in  the  following  words ; 

"The  religion  which  these  later  poems  of  Wordsworth's  embody 
is  rather  the  stately  tradition  of  a  great  church  than  the  pangs 
and  aspirations  of  a  holy  soul.  There  is  little  in  them,  whether 
for  good  or  evil,  of  the  stuff  of  which  a  Paul,  a  Francis,  a 
Dominic  are  made.  That  fervent  emotion — akin  to  the  passion 
of  love  rather  than  to  intellectual  or  moral  conviction — finds 
voice  through  singers  of  a  very  different  tone.  It  is  fed  by  an 
inward  anguish  and  felicity  which,  to  those  who  have  not  felt 
them,  seem  as  causeless  as  a  lover's  moods;  by  wrestlings  not 
with  flesh  and  blood;  by  nights  of  despairing  self-abasement; 
by  ecstasies  of  an  incommunicable  peace." 

For  what  we  must  call  the  narrowness  of  Words- 
worth's religious  outlook,  as  the  opinions  of  his  later 
years  became  more  and  more  stiffened  with  ecclesias- 
ticism,  we  may  at  least  be  sympathetic  to  the  extent 
of  accepting  Professor  Dowden's  explanation. 

"When  with  growing  years  he  became  better  acquainted  with 
suffering,  trial,  and  human  infirmity,  he  came  to  value  more 
than  he  did  at  first  all  those  aids  to  the  spiritual  in  man  which 
are  afforded  by  institutions,  customs,  ceremonies,  places,  rites, 
ordinances,  about  which  our  best  feelings  are  gathered  and 
which  are  associated  with  our  most  sacred  experiences.     He 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  151 

found  higher  uses  than  he  had  formerly  conceived  in  what  is 
historical,  in  what  is  traditional." 

Yet  we  cannot  help  feeling  that,  to  quote  from  the 
most  thoroughgoing  of  modern  Wordsworthians, 

"Not  here,  O  Apollo  I 
Are  haunts  meet  for  thee. 
But,  where  Helicon  breaks  down 
In  cliff  to  the  sea." 

In  other  words,  this  singer  and  priest  of  natural  reli- 
gion finds  himself  in  an  element  alien  to  his  genius 
when  he  has  recourse  to  the  historical  and  tradi- 
tional phases  of  religious  belief;  the  haunts  meet  for 
him  are,  not  indeed  the  cliff  of  Helicon,  but  the  Cum- 
berland Hills  and  the  lakes  that  nestle  among  them. 

The  essential  spirit  of  the  Tintern  Abbey  verses, 
which  we  remember  were  included  among  the  "Lyrical 
Ballads,"  "was  for  practical  purposes  as  new  to  man- 
kind as   the   essential   spirit  of  the  Sermon   on  the 
Mount,"   says  Frederic   Myers,   and   thus   goes   on: 
"therefore  it  is  that  Wordsworth  is  venerated;  be- 
cause to  so  many  men — indifferent,  it  may  be,  to  , 
literary  or  poetical  effects,  as  such — he  has  shown  ' 
by  the  subtle  intensity  of  his  own  emotion  how  the    • 
contemplation  of  Nature  can  be  made  a  revealing     \ 
agency,  like  Love  or  Prayer — an  opening,  if  indeed 
there  be  any  opening,  into  the  transcendent  world.".     \ 
All  lovers  of  poetry  know  this  new  vision  of  the  world 
that  Wordsworth  has  given  to  them,  know  it  and 
count  it  among  the  most  precious  of  their  spiritual 


152  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

possessions.    It  is  to  him  that  we  owe  those  rare  hours 

or  moments, 

"When  the  light  of  sense 
Goes  out,  but  with  a  flash  that  has  revealed 
The  invisible  world;" 

he  it  is  who  has  added  to  our  vision  of  nature 

"The  gleam. 
The  light  that  never  was,  on  sea  or  land. 
The  consecration,  and  the  Poet's  dream." 


/ 


recent  writer,  Mr.  Edmond  Holmes,  discusses  the 
/  way  in  which  the  poet  becomes  the  mterpreter  of 
^  nature  to  ordinary  men.     He  tells  us,  for  example, 
of  the  dawn,  and, 

"in  and  through  the  feelings  that  the  beauty  and  dawn  have 
generated,  another  feeling,  at  once  more  subtle  and  more  in- 
tense, begins  to  live  and  work  in  our  hearts;  a  feeling  of 
inexpugnable  certitude;  a  sense  of  partnership  in  a  world-wide 
and  eternal  victory;  an  overmastering  conviction  that  the 
problems  which  baffle  us,  the  riddles  which  mock  us,  have  no 
real  existence,  the  whole  course  of  nature  being  in  very  truth 
as  sure,  as  clear,  and  as  glorious  as  the  dawn  of  day.  ...  It 
is  the  function  of  the  poet  who  describes  the  da\STi  to  expe- 
rience this  incommunicable  feeling  and  awake  it  in  us.  He  can 
do  this  by  so  painting  the  dawn  as  to  ravish  our  bodily  senses 
through  the  medium  of  memory  and  imagination,  and  then 
leaving  it  to  us  to  discover,  behind  and  beyond  the  more 
sensuous  feeling,  that  deeper  emotion  which  I  have  vainly  tried 
to  describe." 

No  such  passage  as  this  could  have  been  written,  no 
such  analysis  would  have  been  possible,  were  it  not 
for  the  spell  of  Wordsworth  upon  our  poetry.    There 


/ 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  153 

are  so  many  pages  of  Wordsworth  upon  which  this 
passage  may  serve  as  a  commentary  that  I  hardly 
know  which  to  select.  These  verses  from  the  "Pre- 
lude" will  do  as  well  as  any. 

"Magnificent 
The  morning  rose,  in  memorable  pomp, 
Glorious  as  e'er  I  had  beheld — in  front. 
The  sea  lay  laughing  at  a  distance;  near. 
The  solid  mountains  shone,  bright  as  the  clouds. 
Grain-tinctured,  drenched  in  empyrean  light; 
And  in  the  meadows  and  the  lower  grounds 
Was  all  the  sweetness  of  a  common  dawn — 
Dews,  vapours,  and  the  melody  of  birds. 
And  labourers  going  forth  to  till  the  field. 
Ah !  need  I  say,  dear  Friend !  that  to  the  brim 
My  heart  was  full;  I  made  no  vows,  but  vows 
Were  then  made  for  me;  bond  unknown  to  me 
Was  given,  that  I  should  be,  else  sinning  greatly, 
A  dedicated  Spirit." 

"A  dedicated  spirit."  These  words  are  the  keynote 
of  Wordsworth's  character.  A  spirit  dedicated  to 
the  service  of  man,  to  the  task  of  unsealing  those 
springs  of  joy  that  are  so  near  at  hand,  if  we  only 
knew  the  approaches  to  them.  Let  us  take,  as  an- 
other illustration  of  Wordsworth's  power  to  make 
us  share  in  the  deep  and  spiritualised  emotion  with 
which  he  looked  upon  nature,  this  sonnet  on  "The 
Trossachs." 

"There's  not  a  nook  within  this  solemn  pass. 
But  were  an  apt  confessional  for  one 
Taught  by  his  summer  spent,  his  autumn  gone. 
That  life  is  but  a  tale  of  morning  grass 
Withered  at  eve.     From  scenes  of  art  which  chase 
That  thought  away,  turn,  and  with  watchful  eyes 


154  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

Feed  it  'mid  Nature's  old  felicities, 
Rocks,  rivers,  and  smooth  lakes  more  clear  than  glass 
Untouched,  unbreathed  upon.    Thrice  happy  guest, 
If  from  a  golden  perch  of  aspen  spray 
(October's  workmanship  to  rival  May) 
The  pensive  warbler  of  the  ruddy  breast 
That  moral  sweeten  by  a  heaven-taught  lay 
Lulling  the  year,  with  all  its  cares,  to  rest!" 

Talking  one  day  with  Aubrey  de  Vere,  Wordsworth 
contrasted  his  own  observation  of  nature  with  Scott's 
pencil  and  notebook  method,  and  said:  "Nature  does 
not  permit  an  inventory  to  be  made  of  her  charms ! 
He  should  have  left  his  pencil  and  notebook  at  home, 
fixed  his  eye  as  he  walked  with  a  reverent  attention 
on  all  that  surrounded  him,  and  taken  all  into  a 
heart  that  could  understand  and  enjoy."  /  This  is 
the  secret  of  Wordsworth,  the  heart  that  can  under- 
stand and  enjoy  was  his  possession,  and  he  made  it 
the  possession  of  those  who  came  after  him  and  lis- 
tened to  his  voice.  Pater  remarks  that  "this  sense 
of  a  life  in  natural  objects,  which  in  most  poetry 
is  but  a  rhetorical  artifice,  is  with  Wordsworth  the 
assertion  of  what  for  him  is  almost  literal  fact." 
And  with  what  lofty  ideals,  eternal  as  the  heavens, 
does  he  associate  this  vision  of  the  divine  in  nature. 
The  central  expression  of  this  association  is  that  ode 
to  the  "stern  daughter  of  the  voice  of  God,"  of  which 
Swinburne  asks,  in  words  so  framed  that  no  answer 
is  needed: 

"Is  there  anything  in  modern  poetry  at  once  so  exalted  and 
go  composed,  so  ardent  and  serene,  so  full  of  steadfast  light 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  155 

and  the  flameless  fire  of  imaginative  thought,  as  the  hymn 
which  assigns  to  the  guardianship  of  Duty  or  everlasting  law 
the  fragrance  of  the  flowers  on  earth  and  the  splendour  of 
the  stars  in  heaven?  Here  at  least  his  conception  of  duty,  of 
righteousness,  and  of  truth  is  one  with  the  ideal  of  ^Eschylus, 
of  Alighieri,  and  of  Hugo:  no  less  positive  and  pure,  no  more 
conventional  or  accidental  than  is  theirs." 

The  fame  of  Wordsworth  has  suffered  sharp  vicis- 
situdes. It  has  had  to  contend  against  two  currents 
of  adverse  criticism,  both  of  which  find  much  justi- 
fication. The  one  is  expressed  by  Bagehot  when  he 
says  that  about  Wordsworth's  work  "there  is  a  taint 
of  duty,  a  vicious  sense  of  the  good  man's  task." 
The  other  is  directly  suggested  by  Lowell  when  he 
remarks:  "It  is  not  a  great  Xerxes-army  of  words, 
but  a  compact  Greek  ten  thousand,  that  march  safely 
down  to  posterity."  Concerning  the  former  charge,  it 
must  be  admitted  that  the  Wordsworthians  themselves 
have  injured  their  master's  fame  by  over-insistence 
upon  the  formal  and  didactic  aspects  of  his  work. 
"We  cannot  do  him  justice,"  says  Matthew  Arnold, 
"until  we  dismiss  his  formal  philosophy."  And  the 
same  critic  is  entirely  right  when  he  insists  that,  even 
after  subtracting  all  the  dull  and  prosaic  pages  from 
the  sum  of  Wordsworth's  achievement,  there  remains 
to  him  a  "great  body  of  powerful  and  significant 
work."  If  we  consider  quality  alone,  we  must  admit 
that  Wordsworth  was  equalled,  if  not  overmatched  by 
three  of  his  contemporaries.  But  when  we  consider 
quantity  as  well  as  quahty,  both  Keats  and  Coleridge 
drop  out  of  the  competition,  and  Shelley  alone  re- 


156  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

mains  to  be  reckoned  with.  As  between  Shelley  and 
Wordsworth,  the  question  of  supremacy  is  likely  to 
remain  unsettled,  for  it  is  a  question  into  which  the 
subjective  element  enters  more  largely  than  into  most 
comparisons  of  this  sort.  If  it  came  to  the  hard 
choice  of  relinquishing  one  of  the  two  poets,  my 
personal  feeling  would  be  that  the  work  of  Shelley 
must  be  preserved  at  whatever  sacrifice,  but  I  have 
no  quarrel  with  those  who  would  choose  the  other 
alternative.  Happily,  such  difficult  decisions  are 
purely  academic,  and  even  to  discuss  them  is  futile. 
Of  Wordsworth  it  should  be  observed  that  recent 
years  have  amply  atoned  for  the  neglect  into  which 
his  fame  seemed  to  have  fallen  during  the  generation 
that  succeeded  his  death.  His  own  confidence  in  the 
future  of  his  poems  was  not  misplaced,  as  is  proved  by 
many  recent  critical  indications.  "Trouble  not  your- 
self," he  wrote  to  Lady  Beaumont,  "upon  their  pres- 
ent reception ;  of  what  moment  is  that  compared  with 
what  I  trust  is  their  destiny? — to  console  the  af- 
flicted; to  add  sunshine  to  daylight  by  making  the 
happy  happier ;  to  teach  the  young  and  the  gracious 
of  every  age  to  see,  to  think  and  feel,  and,  therefore, 
to  become  more  actively  and  securely  virtuous ;  this 
is  their  office,  which  I  trust  they  will  faithfully  per- 
form, long  after  we  (that  is,  all  that  is  mortal  of  us) 
are  mouldered  in  our  graves." 

This  power  to  console  the  afflicted,  to  bring  heal- 
ing into  our  lives  and  peace  into  our  souls,  is  what 
makes   the  poetry   of   Wordsworth   so  unspeakably 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  157 

precious  to  us.  No  words  can  ever  express  what 
Wordsworth  has  been  to  thousands  of  men  and  women 
in  their  hour  of  trial,  no  tribute  of  love  can  ever 
embody  all  the  gratitude  which  they  have  felt  for 
his  soothing  ministry.  Arnold  came  as  near  as  pos- 
sible"  l6"^'exj5i^Bt§f!!^  the  inexpressible  when  he  wrote 
these  familiar  Hnes: 

"He  found  us  when  the  age  had  bound 

Our  souls  in  its  benumbing  round; 
He  spoke,  and  loosed  our  heart  in  tears. 
He  laid  us  as  we  lay  at  birth 
On  the  cool  flowery  lap  of  earth, 
Smiles  broke  from  us  and  we  had  ease; 
The  hills  were  round  us,  and  the  breeze 
Went  o'er  the  sun-lit  fields  again; 
Our  foreheads  felt  the  wind  and  rain. 
Our  youth  return'd;  for  there  was  shed 
On  spirits  that  had  long  been  dead, 
Spirits  dried  up  and  closely  furl'd. 
The  freshness  of  the  early  world." 

A  minor  poet  of  our  own  time,  also,  a  poet  who 
sometimes  strikes  a  note  of  sustained  purity,  has 
given  utterance  to  the  same  sense  of  heartfelt  grati- 
tude in  words  peculiarly  fitting  to  be  read  by  the 
poet's  grave. 

"Poet  who  sleepest  by  this  wandering  wave! 

When  thou  wast  born,  what  birth-gift  hadst  thou  then? 
To  thee  what  wealth  was  that  the  Immortals  gave, 
The  wealth  thou  gavest  in  thy  turn  to  men? 

Not  Milton's  keen,  translunar  music  thine; 

Not  Shakespeare's  cloudless,  boundless  human  view; 
Not  Shelley's  flush  of  rose  on  peaks  divine; 

Nor  yet  the  wizard  twilight  Coleridge  knew. 


158  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH 

**W'hat  hadst  thou  that  could  make  so  large  amends 
For  all  thou  hadst  not  and  thy  peers  possessed. 
Motion  and  fire,  swift  means  to  radiant  ends? — 
Thou  hadst,  for  weary  feet,  the  gift  of  rest. 

"From  Shelley's  dazzling  glow  or  thunderous  haze, 

From  Byron's  tempest-anger,  tempest-mirth, 
Men  turned  to  thee  and  found — not  blast  and  blaze. 
Tumult  of  tottering  heavens,  but  peace  on  earth. 

"Nor  peace  that  grows  by  Lethe,  scentless  flower, 
There  in  white  languors  to  decline  and  cease; 
But  peace  whose  names  are  also  rapture,  power. 
Clear  sight,  and  love:  for  these  are  parts  of  peace." 


Malter  Savaae  XanJ)or 

In  dealing  with  the  six  English  poets  who  belong 
to  the  first  half  of  the  century,  it  has  seemed  best, 
for  reasons  already  noted,  to  arrange  them  in  the 
order  provided  by  the  dates  of  their  respective  deaths. 
Attention  has  already  been  called  to  the  curious  fact 
that  each  of  the  poets  thus  far  considered  enjoyed 
a  span  of  life  which  overlapped  at  both  ends  that 
of  the  poet  who  precedes  him  in  this  discussion.  Thus 
the  death-dates  of  our  poets  have  carried  us  forward, 
into  the  nineteenth  century  from  1821,  when  Keats 
died,  to  1850,  when  Wordsworth  breathed  his  last, 
and  the  laurel  passed  "from  the  brows  of  him  who 
uttered  nothing  base."  On  the  other  hand,  the  birth- 
dates  of  the  same  poets  have  carried  us  backward  into 
the  eighteenth  century  from  1795,  when  Keats  first 
saw  the  light,  to  1770,  the  year  which  gave  Words- 
worth to  the  world.  Turning  now  to  Walter  Savage 
Landor,  the  first  break  appears  in  the  series,  for, 
although  he  outlived  Wordsworth  by  fourteen  years, 
he  was  five  years  his  junior  by  birth.  There  are 
several  things  to  remark  about  the  long  term  of 
Landor's  life.  Longer  even  than  that  of  Tennyson, 
it  made  Landor  in  his  old  age  the  most  venerable 
figure  among  our  poets.    And  if  his  life  was  remark- 

159 


160  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

able  for  its  length,  it  was  even  more  remarkable  for 
the  number  of  years  during  which  he  retained  his 
intellectual  faculties  unimpaired.  "Gebir"  was  pub- 
Hshed  in  1798,  the  year  of  the  "Lyrical  Ballads,"  and 
it  was  not  the  poet's  first  venture,  for  he  had  pub- 
hshed  a  small  volume  of  verse  two  years  earlier. 
Half  a  century  later,  when  the  flame  of  Wordsworth's 
genius  was  flickering  out,  Landor's  "Hellenics"  were 
given  to  the  world.  He  had  already  exceeded  the 
scriptural  tale  of  years,  and  seemed  to  have  just 
reached  his  intellectual  prime.  For  nearly  a  score 
of  3^ears  longer  his  pen  remained  active ;  great  quan- 
tities of  prose  and  verse  continued  to  flow  from  it, 
and  in  the  year  before  his  death,  at  the  age  of  eighty- 
eight,  the  volume  of  his  "Heroic  Idylls"  crowned  the 
astonishing  performance  of  his  life.  For  seventy 
years  he  had  been  producing  work  that  belongs  to 
English  literature,  work  that  was  almost  as  finished 
and  satisfactory  to  the  artistic  sense  at  the  beginning 
of  his  career  as  at  any  later  period.  The  best 
passages  of  "Gebir"  are  equal  to  anything  he  did 
afterwards.  As  Mr.  Stedman  finely  says:  "He 
attained  the  summit  early,  and  moved  along  an  ele- 
vated plateau,  forbearing  as  he  grew  older  to  descend 
the  further  side,  and  at  death  flung  off^  somewhere 
into  the  aether  still  facing  the  daybreak  and  wor- 
shipped by  many  rising  stars."  Notliing  is  more 
striking  about  the  work  of  Landor  than  this  even 
excellence  by  which  it  is  characterised  throughout. 
With  most  poets  we  have  periods  to  consider,  and  our 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  161 

interest  in  their  work  is  largely  the  interest  which 
we  take  in  observing  the  gradual  development  of 
their  powers.  Little  of  this  sort  of  interest  attaches 
to  the  work  of  Landor;  he  sprang  full-armed  into 
the  arena,  and  for  seventy  years  held  his  own  with 
substantially  the  same  fighting  equipment.  Mean- 
while, the  great  panorama  of  European  society  and 
politics  was  unrolling  itself  before  him,  and  he  was 
following  the  succession  of  scenes  with  close  atten- 
tion, keen  in  observation  and  alert  in  criticism  to  the 
very  end,  taking  for  his  province  almost  the  whole 
of  contemporaneous  thought  and  action.  He  grew 
to  manhood  during  the  years  of  the  Revolution,  felt 
the  shock  of  that  great  convulsion  in  much  the  same 
manner  as  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  felt  it,  was 
aroused  to  an  even  fiercer  indignation  than  any  of 
his  fellow-poets  by  the  Napoleonic  attack  upon  the 
liberties  of  Europe,  and,  like  Byron  at  a  later  period, 
for  a  time  actually  cast  his  lot  with  a  people  strug- 
gling to  be  free.  His  unquenchable  faith  in  the 
republican  principle  survived  the  reaction  which  car- 
ried Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  and  Southey  into 
the  conservative  camp,  and  made  them  lost  leaders  to 
the  cause  of  liberty.  When  the  year  of  Revolution 
returned  to  Europe  in  1848,  and  his  faith  was  again 
justified  by  passing  events,  he  was  the  same  eloquent 
and  resolute  champion  of  republicanism  that  he  had 
been  forty  and  fifty  years  earlier.  And  still  he  lived 
on,  long  enough  to  witness  the  liberation  of  the 
greater  part  of  Italy  from  oppressors,  domestic  and 


162  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

foreign;  long  enough  to  see  the  dream  of  Itahan 
patriotism  almost  accomplished,  and  the  capital  of 
the  nearly  united  kingdom  about  to  be  estabhshed 
in  the  city  which  for  many  years  had  been  his  chosen 
home.  Swinburne's  beautiful  verses,  written  in  1865, 
at  once  celebrate  this  event  and  mourn  the  death  of 
the  poet  by  whom  it  would  have  been  acclaimed  with 
so  much  enthusiasm. 

"Back  to  the  flower-town,  side  by  side. 
The  bright  months  bring, 
New-born,  the  bridegroom  and  the  bride. 
Freedom  and  spring. 

"The   sweet  land  laughs  from  sea  to  sea. 
Filled  full  of  sun; 
All  things  come  back  to  her,  being  free; 
All  things  but  one." 

The  convention  which  made  Florence  the  temporary 
capital  of  Italy  had  been  signed  just  two  days  before 
Landor's  death. 

Landor's  politics  were  alwa^^s  impetuous  and  some- 
what boyish.  One  of  his  earliest  enthusiasms  was 
for  George  Washington,  and  one  of  his  first  poems 
was  an  ode  to  the  American  general,  written  at  the 
age  of  nineteen.     Here  are  two  of  the  stanzas: 

"Exulting  on  unwearied  wings 
Above  where  incense  clouds  the  court  of  kings. 

Arise,  immortal  Muse!  arise! 
Beyond  the  confines  of  the  Atlantic  waves. 
O'er  cities  free  from  despots,  free  from  slaves. 

Go,  seek  the  tepid  calm  of  purer  skies. 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  163 

But,  hail  thou  hero !  born  to  prove 

Thy  country's  glory  and  thy  country's  love, 

To  break  her  regal  iron  rod: 
Of  justice  certain,  fearless  of  success, 
Her  rights  to  vindicate,  her  wrongs  redress. 
Her  sceptre  to  transfer  from  tyrants  to  her  God." 

His  admiration  for  Washington  was  associated  with 
an  equally  pronounced  aversion  for  George  III. 
When  a  child,  he  startled  his  family  by  expressing 
a  wish  that  the  French  would  invade  England  and 
hang  the  King  together  with  the  two  Archbishops, 
for  which  sentiment  his  ears  were  soundly  boxed.  At 
Oxford,  his  radical  opinions  earned  for  him  the  title 
of  the  "Mad  Jacobin."  When  he  went  into  journal- 
ism a  few  years  later,  he  found  his  special  antipathy 
in  Pitt,  for  whom  his  favourite  epithet  was  "the  ex- 
ecrable." During  the  years  of  the  Directory  and 
the  Consulate,  he  continued  to  believe  in  the  Revolu- 
tion, but  he  learned  to  despise  the  French  people  as 
the  most  inconstant  of  human  beings.  "As  to  the 
cause  of  liberty,  this  cursed  nation  has  ruined  it  for- 
ever," he  wrote  from  Paris  at  this  time.  He  was 
never  misled  by  the  vapourings  of  the  revolutionary 
philosophy,  and  his  intellect  always  had  a  practical 
bent  which  saved  him  from  taking  too  seriously  the 
abstractions  of  such  a  book  as  Godwin's  "Political 
Justice,"  which  for  a  period  shaped  the  entire 
thought  of  Wordsworth  and  Shelley.  Professor 
Dowden  says  that  "Landor's  scorn  for  what  may  be 
galled  the  metaphysics  of  revolution  preserved  him 


164  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

from  the  vacuous  rhetoric  and  the  bandying  of  popu- 
lar catchwords  which  are  dear  to  the  hearts  of  some 
prophets  of  democracy.  He  was  in  no  sense  of  the 
school  of  the  prophets.  His  conception  of  a  free, 
adult,  proud,  and  cultivated  nation  has  a  grandeur 
derived  from  the  definite  and  positive  character  of 
his  imagination."  He  was  particularly  interested 
in  the  young  South  American  republics,  and  hoped 
that  there  might  arise  in  the  southern  continent  of 
the  new  world  a  confederacy  united  against  all 
"institutions  not  founded  upon  that  equable,  sound, 
beneficent  system,  to  which  the  best  energies  of  man, 
the  sterner  virtues,  the  milder  charities,  the  com- 
forts and  satisfactions  of  life,  its  regulated  and  right 
affections,  the  useful  arts,  the  ennobling  sciences,  with 
whatever  is  innocent  in  glory  or  useful  in  pleasure, 
owe  their  origin,  their  protection,  their  progress, 
and  their  maturity."  His  ideals  were  expressed 
many  years  later  in  the  beautiful  lines  of  his 
"Hellenics." 

"We  are  what  suns  and  winds  and  waters  make  us ; 
The  mountains  are  our  sponsors,  and  the  rills 
Fashion  and  win  their  nursling  with  their  smiles. 
But  where  the  land  is  dim  with  tyranny, 
There  tiny  pleasures  occupy  the  place 
Of  glories  and  of  duties;  as  the  feet 
Of  fabled  faeries  when  the  sun  goes  down 
Trip  o'er  the  grass  where  wrestlers  strove  by  day." 

When  the  infamous  plot  of  Napoleon  to  make  him- 
self master  of  Spain   and  Portugal  was  disclosed, 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  165 

Landor  joined  in  the  indignant  outcry  which  arose 
from  all  England.  Nor  was  he  content  with  indig- 
nant words  alone,  but  at  once  set  about  the  organisa- 
tion of  a  relief  expedition.  He  set  sail  for  Corunna, 
and  offered  his  services  to  the  Spanish  patriots, 
agreeing  to  equip  a  regiment  of  a  thousand  volun- 
teers. The  offer  was  gratefully  received,  and  the 
troop  was  enrolled.  He  remained  with  it  for  about 
three  months,  and  took  part  in  some  petty  skir- 
mishing, but  misunderstandings  arose,  he  took  um- 
brage at  a  fancied  slight,  and  returned  to  England 
without  having  accomplished  anything  of  great  im- 
portance. Just  at  this  time  the  Convention  of 
Cintra  was  made,  which  aroused  him  as  it  did  Words- 
worth, and  to  even  more  vehement  utterance.  "If 
nothing  personal  had  driven  me  home,"  he  wrote, 
"still  I  could  not  have  endured  the  questions  of  brave 
and  generous  Spaniards, — why  we  permitted  the 
French  to  retain  their  plunder,  why  we  placed  them 
again  in  array  against  Spain,  why  we  snatched  them 
from  the  fury  of  the  Portuguese,  why  we  indulged 
them  with  more  precious  fruits  than  they  could  have 
gathered  from  the  completest  victory?"  The  chief 
literary  significance  of  this  Spanish  expedition  is  to 
be  found  in  the  fact  that  it  inspired,  at  least  indi- 
rectly, the  lofty  tragedy  of  "Count  Julian."  This 
work,  which  Swinburne  calls  "the  sublimest  poem 
published  in  our  language  between  the  last  master- 
piece of  Milton  and  the  first  masterpiece  of  Shelley — 
one    equally   worthy    to    stand    unchallenged   beside 


166  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

either  for  poetic  perfection  as  well  as  moral  maj- 
esty,"— deals  with  the  period  of  the  last  of  the 
Gothic  kings  of  Spain.  Julian  is  the  most  powerful 
of  the  Spanish  nobles,  and  has  just  expelled  the 
Moors  from  his  country,  when,  learning  that  his 
daughter  has  been  dishonoured  by  the  king  himself, 
he  brings  back  the  infidel  hosts  whom  he  has  just 
driven  out,  and  overthrows  the  monarchy.  "A  more 
tragical  conception  nowhere  exists,"  Landor's  biog- 
rapher truthfully  observes.  Swinburne  says  that  it 
has  "some  points  of  greatness  in  common"  with 
"Samson  Agonistes"  and  "Prometheus  Unbound," 
adding  that  "the  superhuman  isolation  of  agony  and 
endurance  which  encircles  and  exalts  the  hero  is  in 
each  case  expressed  with  equally  appropriate  magnifi- 
cence of  effect."  And  De  Quincey,  whose  estimate  of 
Landor  is  otherwise  grudging  and  unsympathetic, 
goes  so  far  as  to  liken  the  tragedy  to  a  greater 
"Prometheus"  than  that  of  Shelley. 

"After  all  has  been  done  which  intellectual  power  could  do 
since  iEschylus,  and  since  Milton  in  his  Satan,  no  embodiment 
of  the  Promethean  situation,  none  of  the  Promethean  character, 
fixes  the  attentive  eye  upon  itself  with  the  same  secret  feeling 
of  fidelity  to  the  vast  archetj^je,  as  Mr.  Landor's  'Count  Julian.' 
There  is  in  this  modern  aerolith  the  same  jewelly  lustre  which 
cannot  be  mistaken;  the  same  non  imitabile  fulgor;  and  the 
same  character  of  fracture  or  cleavage,  as  mineralogists  speak, 
for  its  beaming  iridescent  grandeur,  redoubling  under  the 
crush  of  misery.  The  colour  and  the  coruscation  are  the 
same  when  splintered  by  violence,  the  tones  of  the  rocky  harp 
are  the  same  when  swept  by  sorrow.  There  is  the  same  spirit 
of  heavenly   persecution   against  his  enemy,  persecution  that 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  167 

would  have  hung  upon  his  rear,  and  burned  after  him  to  the 
bottomless  pit,  though  it  had  yawned  for  both;  there  is  the 
same  gulf  fixed  between  the  possibilities  of  their  reconciliation; 
the  same  immortality  of  their  resistance,  the  same  eternity  of 
abysmal  sorrow." 

No  calm  will  ever  be  his,  says  the  Moor, 

"Not  victory  that  o'ershadows  him  sees  he; 
No  airy  and  light  passion  stirs  abroad 
To  ruffle  or  to  soothe  him ;  all  are  quelled 
Beneath  a  mightier,  sterner  stress  of  mind: 
Wakeful  he  sits,  and  lonely,  and  unmoved. 
Beyond  the  arrows,  views,  or  shouts  of  men; 
As  oftentimes  an  eagle,  ere  the  sun 
Throws  o'er  the  varying  earth  his  early  ray, 
Stands  solitary,  stands  immovable 
Upon  some  highest  cliff,  and  rolls  his  eye. 
Clear,  constant,  unobservant,  unabased. 
In  the  cold  light  above  the  dews  of  morn." 

And  still  another  of  the  Moorish  allies  declares : 

"He  fills  me  with  a  greater  awe  than  e'er 
The  field  of  battle,  with  himself  the  first. 
When  every  flag  that  waved  along  our  host 
Droop't  down  the  staff,  as  if  the  very  winds 
Hung  in  suspense  before  him.     Bid  him  go 
And  peace  be  with  him,  or  let  me  depart. 
Lo!  like  a  God,  sole  and  inscrutable. 
He  stands  above  our  pity." 

Here  was  a  subject  that  appealed  strongly  to  Lan- 
dor,  and  he  concentrated  all  his  powers  upon  it. 
When  he  sent  the  completed  tragedy  to  Southey,  he 
wrote : 

"My  hours  were  four  or  five  together,  after  long  walks,  in 
which  I  brought  before  me  the  various  characters,  the  very 


168  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

tones  of  their  voices,  their  forms,  complexions,  and  step.  In 
the  daytime  I  laboured  and  at  night  unburdened  my  mind, 
shedding  many  tears.  People  have  laughed  at  Voltaire  for 
weeping  at  the  representation  of  his  own  tragedies.  For  my 
own  part  I  believe  he  never  was  half  so  sincere  on  any  other 
occasion.  Thorough-paced  rascal  and  true  Frenchman  as  he 
was,  here  was  neither  deceit  nor  affectation." 

One  other  result  of  Landor's  Spanish  expedition,  a 
result  as  lasting  as  the  marble  upon  which  it  was 
engraved,  was  the  Latin  inscription  written  for  the 
Spanish  patriots  who  had  given  their  lives  for  their 
country.  "That  scripture  of  the  sun,"  Swinburne 
calls  it, 

"Writ  as  with  fire  and  light  on  heaven's  own  crest. 
Of  all  words  heard  on  earth  the  noblest  one 
That  ever  spake  for  souls  and  left  them  blest.'* 

It  runs  as  follows : 

"Emeriti  lubenter  quiesceremus, 
Libertate  partd: 
Quiescimus  amissa  perlubenter," 

and  preserves  nearly  all  of  its  dignity  in  Swinburne's 
translation. 

"Gladly  we  should  rest  ever,  had  we  won 
Freedom :  we  have  lost,  and  very  gladly  rest." 

When  the  Greek  revolution  broke  out  in  1821,  it 
found  in  Landor  a  champion  no  less  impassioned  than 
Shelley,  and  if  there  be  anywhere  in  English  poetry 
lines  which  vie  in  sublimity  with  the  best  parts  of 
Shelley's  "Hellas,"  they  must  be  sought  in  Landor's 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  169 

two  poems,  "Regeneration"  and  "To  Corinth,"  in- 
spired by  the  Greek  uprising.  It  was  the  destruction 
of  the  Turkish  fleet  by  Canaris,  with  two  fireships 
and  a  handful  of  men,  that  occasioned  the  following 
outburst : 

"What  thunder  bursts  upon  mine  ear !  some  isle 
Hath  surely  risen  from  the  gulphs  profound, 
Eager  to  suck  the  sunshine  from  the  breast 
Of  beauteous  Nature,  and  to  catch  the  gale 
From  golden  Hermus  and  Melena's  brow. 
A  greater  thing  than  isle,  than  continent. 
Than  earth  itself,  than  ocean  circling  earth. 
Hath  risen  there;  regenerate  Man  hath  risen. 
Generous  old  bard  of  Chios!  not  that  Jove 
Deprived  thee  in  thy  latter  days  of  sight 
Would  I  complain,  but  that  no  higher  theme 
Than  a  disdainful  youth,  a  lawless  king, 
A  pestilence,  a  pyre,  awoke  thy  song. 
When  on  the  Chian  coast,  one  javelin's  throw 
From  where  thy  tombstone,  where  thy  cradle  stood, 
Twice  twenty  self-devoted  Greeks  assail'd 
The  naval  host  of  Asia,  at  one  blow 
Scattered  it  into  air  .  .  .  and  Greece  was  free.  .  . 
And  ere  these  glories  beam'd,  thy  day  had  closed. 
Let  all  that  Elis  ever  saw,  give  way. 
All  that  Olympian  Jove  e'er  smiled  upon: 
The  Marathonian  columns  never  told 
A  tale  more  glorious,  never  Salamis, 
Nor,  faithful  in  the  centre  of  the  false, 
Platea,  nor  Anthela,  from  whose  mount 
Benignant  Ceres  wards  the  blessed  Laws, 
And  sees  the  Amphictyon  dip  his  weary  foot 
In  the  warm  streamlet  of  the  strait  below." 

To  these  heroes  of  modern  Greece  even  the  shades 
of  Leonidas  and  of  Timoleon  will  not  grudge  a  wel- 


170  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

come ;  their  glory  is  one  with  the  glory  of  the  great 
spirits  of  antiquity. 

"Peace,  praise,  eternal  gladness,  to  the  souls 
That,  rising  from  the  seas  into  the  heavens, 
Have  ransom'd  first  their  country  with  their  blood ! 
O  thou  immortal  Spartan !  at  whose  name 
The  marble  table  sounds  beneath  my  palms, 
Leonidas !  even  thou  wilt  not  disdain 
To  mingle  names  august  as  these  with  thine; 
Nor  thou,  twin-star  of  glory,  thou  whose  rays 
Stream'd  over  Corinth  on  the  double  sea, 
Achaian  and  Saronic;  whom  the  sons 
Of  Syracuse  when  Death  removed  thy  light. 
Wept  more  than  slavery  ever  made  them  weep. 
But  shed  (if  gratitude  is  sweet)  sweet  tears." 

The  lines  "To  Corinth,"  although  less  specific  in  their 
inspiration  than  those  of  the  poem  from  which  the 
preceding  extracts  have  been  made,  must  be  drawn 
upon  for  two  passages  of  exquisite  and  typically 
Landorian  beauty.     They  begin  thus: 

"Queen  of  the  double  sea,  beloved  of  him 
Who  shakes  the  world's  foundations,  thou  hast  seen 
Glory  in  all  her  beauty,  all  her  forms; 
Seen  her  walk  back  with  Theseus  when  he  left 
The  bones  of  Sciron  bleaching  to  the  wind. 
Above  the  ocean's  roar  and  cormorant's  flight. 
So  high  that  vastest  billows  from  above 
Show  but  like  herbage  waving  in  the  mead; 
Seen  generations  throng  thy  Isthmian  games. 
And  pass  away;  the  beautiful,  the  brave. 
And  them  who  sang  their  praises." 

And  thus  they  close: 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  171 

"To  give  the  inertest  masses  of  our  earth 
Her  loveliest  forms,  was  thine;  to  fix  the  Gods 
Within  thy  walls,  and  hang  their  tripods  round 
With  fruits  and  foliage  knowing  not  decay. 
A  nobler  work  remains:  thy  citadel 
Invites  all  Greece;  o'er  lands  and  floods  remote 
Many  are  the  hearts  that  still  beat  high  for  thee: 
Confide  then  in  thy  strength,  and  unappall'd 
Look  down  upon  the  plain,  while  yokemate  kings 
Run  bellowing  where  their  herdsmen  goad  them  on. 
Instinct  is  sharp  in  them  and  terror  true. 
They  smell  the  floor  whereon  their  necks  must  lie." 

The  Homeric  simplicity  and  directness  of  that  last 
figure  is  beyond  all  praise.  Throughout  his  life 
Landor  continued  to  observe  with  the  closest  atten- 
tion the  political  happenings  of  his  time,  taking  fresh 
heart  for  humanity  with  every  new  revolutionary  out- 
burst. He  poured  out  the  full  measure  of  his  indig- 
nation upon  the  Holy  Alliance,  and  upon  the  broken 
pledges  of  the  period  of  reaction.  One  of  the  revolts 
at  Naples  made  him  exclaim:  "I  wish  I  had  some 
thousand  pounds  to  spare,  as  I  had  when  the  Span- 
iards rose  against  Bonaparte,  that  what  I  offered 
to  them  I  might  offer  to  the  Neapolitans."  In  his 
old  age  he  sent  greeting  to  Mazzini  in  these  words: 

"And  could  not  you,  Mazzini!  wait  awhile? 

The  grass  is  wither'd,  but  shall  spring  again; 
The  Gods,  who  frown  on  Italy,  will  smile 

As  in  old  times,  and  men  once  more  be  men." 

His  hatred  of  all  tyrants  and  all  forms  of  political 
oppression  occasionally  impelled  him  to  say  unwise 


172  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

and  Intemperate  things,  to  sanction  violent  methods 
and  measures.  We  can  hardly  go  with  him  to  the 
extreme  of  such  a  declaration  as  this: 

"Most  dear  of  all  the  Virtues  to  her  Sire 
Is  Justice;  and  most  dear 
To  Justice  is  TjTannicide;  the  fire 
That  guides  her  flashes  near," 

but  his  pitiless  judgments  upon  individual  tyrants 
are  acceptable  to  every  lover  of  human  Hberty.  His 
judgment  upon  the  arch-offender  Napoleon,  ex- 
pressed in  the  two  following  passages,  is  not  easily  to 
be  matched  for  incisive  finahty. 

"He  was  urged  by  no  necessity,  he  was  prompted  by  no  policy; 
his  impatience  of  courage  in  an  enemy,  his  hatred  of  patriot- 
ism and  integrity,  in  all  of  which  he  had  no  idea  himself  and 
saw  no  image  in  those  about  him,  outstripped  his  blind  passion 
for  fame  and  left  him  nothing  but  power  and  celebrity." 
"Hiere  is  no  example  in  history  of  a  man  who  made  so  little  of 
so  much:  there  is  no  example  of  one  who  lost  so  many  armies, 
alienated  so  many  adherents,  exasperated  so  many  potentates, 
defrauded  so  many  nations:  there  is  no  example  of  one  who, 
capable  of  doing  so  extensive  good,  did  preferably  so  extensive 
evil.  He  opened  the  flood  gates  he  was  employed  to  close; 
and  through  them  heaved  back  again  the  stagnant  waters, 
pestilential  to  all  Europe,  which  had  been  excluded  with  so 
much  labour." 

It  is  sometimes  said,  I  think  unfairly,  that  Lan- 
dor's  political  philosophy  is  little  more  than  so  much 
noisy  declamation  against  oppression  and  despotism. 
Without  claiming  for  him  the  title  of  a  constructive 
political  philosopher,  I  think  we  must  admit  that 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  173 

he  had  a  fairly  definite  ideal  of  a  free  human  society. 
It  was  the  ideal  of  the  republic  as  distinguished  from 
that  of  the  democracy.  It  was  the  Miltonic  ideal  of 
a  commonwealth,  in  which  the  wise  should  rule,  and 
should  be  trusted  to  safeguard  the  interests  of  the 
people.  That  form  of  democracy  which  treats  its 
representatives  as  servants,  which  allows  them  no 
discretion,  which  is  ever  seeking  to  force  upon  them 
the  mandate  of  the  moment,  and  which  repudiates 
them  when  they  endeavour  to  exercise  an  independent 
judgment,  seemed  to  Landor,  as  it  has  seemed  to  many 
stout  republicans  before  and  after  him,  a  perver- 
sion of  the  republican  idea.  It  was  because  he  saw 
this  theory  gaining  ground  in  our  own  country  that 
he  declared  to  Emerson  his  abhorrence  of  the  Ameri- 
can democracy.  His  view  of  our  earlier  history  has 
already  been  illustrated  by  his  boyish  ode  to  Wash- 
ington. In  his  diatribe  against  Fox,  written  in  1811, 
printed  but  suppressed  the  following  year,  and  not 
actually  published  until  1907,  he  declares  that  "those 
who  excited  the  American  war  were  guilty  of  high 
treason,  in  violating  the  liberty  of  the  subject,  and 
in  advising  the  sovereign  to  decline  the  redress  of 
grievances."  This  work  was  dedicated  to  President 
Madison,  "the  wisest  and  most  dignified  chief  magis- 
trate that  presides  in  the  present  day  over  the  des- 
tinies of  a  nation,"  words  which  elicited  from  GifFord 
a  characteristic  expression  of  virulent  Toryism: 
"Nothing  but  a  rooted  hatred  of  his  country  could 
have  made  him  dedicate  his  Jacobinical  book  to  the 


174  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

most  contemptible  wretch  that  ever  crept  into  author- 
ity." This  dedication  was  essentially  an  appeal  to 
the  President  to  avert  the  war  which  was  about  to  be 
forced  upon  his  reluctant  administration,  and  elo- 
quently put  the  question:  "Would  it  not  be  deplor- 
able, would  it  not  be  intolerable  to  reason  and  hu- 
manity, that  the  language  of  a  Locke  and  a  Milton 
should  convey  and  retort  the  sentiments  of  a  Bona- 
parte and  a  Robespierre?" 

Several  years  later  President  Jackson  was  made 
the  subject  of  a  poem  which  bade  the  world 

"Behold  the  golden  scales  of  Justice  stand 
Well  balanced  in  a  mailed  hand." 

The  sturdy  democracy  typified  by  Andrew  Jackson 
had  some  admirable  qualities,  but  if  Landor  had 
observed  it  at  closer  range,  he  would  hardly  have 
thought  it  the  realisation  of  his  poHtical  ideal.  What 
he  saw  and  praised  in  Jackson  was  the  strong  man; 
what  he  did  not  discover  was  the  headstrong  partisan. 
Believing  in  republicanism  of  the  Miltonic  type,  he 
was  forced  despairingly  to  admit  that  it  could  hardly 
be  found  existing  anywhere  on  earth.  His  opinions 
are  summarised  by  his  biographer,  who  says:  "The 
nations  on  the  Ebro,  and  the  mountaineers  of  Biscay 
have  enjoyed  it  substantially  for  century  after  cen- 
tury. Holland,  Ragusa,  Genoa,  Venice,  had  been 
deprived  of  it  by  that  Holy  AUiance  whose  influence 
had  withered  the  Continent,  and  changed  even  the 
features  of  England.     One  of  the  worst  of  public 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  175 

calamities,  in  Landor's  opinion,  was  the  overthrow 
of  the  Venetian  repubhc.  Then  was  swept  away 
the  oldest  and  truest  nobility  in  the  world."  These 
are  Landor's  words :  "How  happy  were  the  Venetian 
states,  governed  for  a  thousand  years  by  the  brave 
and  intelligent  gentlemen  of  the  island  city !  All 
who  did  not  conspire  against  its  security  were  secure. 
Look  at  the  palaces  they  erected.  Look  at  the  arts 
they  cultivated.  And  look  now  at  their  damp  and 
decaying  walls."  Landor's  mind  was  not  of  the 
despairing  sort,  however,  and  even  the  present  spec- 
tacle of  Venetian  decay  did  not  quench  his  hope  of 
a  future  Venetian  regeneration.  The  political  phi- 
losophy which  distrusts  those  systems  in  which  im- 
pulse is  not  restrained  by  self-imposed  checks  against 
its  own  excesses,  which  holds  that  a  wise  people  will 
rely  upon  the  wisdom  of  its  representatives  instead 
of  regarding  them  as  objects  of  constant  suspicion, 
is  a  philosophy  neither  discredited  by  historical  fact 
nor  condemned  by  theory  as  utopian.  It  offers  an 
ideal  which  is  realised  in  countless  numbers  of  the 
lesser  societies  formed  for  various  specific  purposes; 
why  should  it  not  become  realised  in  the  greater 
societies  formed  for  the  purpose  of  government.''  At 
all  events,  Landor's  view  is  that  of  many  among  the 
closest  and  most  practical  students  of  the  subject, 
to  whom  it  seems  to  offer  the  only  possible  permanent 
solution  of  the  great  democratic  problem. 

Landor  was  by  temperament  unfitted  for  abstract 
speculation,   and  we  must  not   expect   to  find   any 


176  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

formal  philosophy  in  his  writings.  It  is  unwise  to 
seek  for  a  formal  philosophy  in  any  poet,  although 
we  are  tempted  to  make  the  search  in  the  case  of  such 
men  as  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth,  who  are  char- 
acterised by  the  speculative  temper,  and  whose  works 
seem  to  invite  us  to  such  a  quest.  Even  in  those 
cases,  we  get  results  of  questionable  value,  and  run 
the  risk  of  missing  the  true  meaning  and  significance 
of  the  work;  in  the  case  of  Landor  we  should  find 
even  less  to  reward  us  for  our  pains.  Abstractions 
were  not  for  him ;  his  mind  was  of  the  concrete  type 
which  delights  in  observing  individual  phenomena, 
and  is  content  with  the  presentation  of  what  it  sees. 
What  he  thought  and  felt  about  religious  matters 
may  be  illustrated  by  two  or  three  passages.  In 
the  conversation  between  Calvin  and  Melancthon,  the 
latter  is  made  to  say :  "What  a  curse  hath  metaphor 
been  to  religion  I  It  is  the  wedge  that  holds  asunder 
the  two  great  portions  of  the  Christian  world.  We 
hear  of  nothing  so  commonly  as  fire  and  sword.  And 
here,  indeed,  what  was  metaphor  is  converted  into 
substance  and  applied  to  practice."  In  the  dialogue 
between  Lucian  and  Timotheus,  the  pagan  gets  the 
better  of  the  Christian,  and  is  given  such  words  as 
these:  "We  are  upon  earth  to  learn  what  can  be 
learnt  upon  earth,  and  not  to  speculate  on  what  nevef 
can  be.  .  .  .  Let  men  learn  what  benefits  men; 
above  all  things,  to  contract  their  wishes,  to  calm 
their  passions,  and,  more  especially,  to  dispel  their 
fears.    Now  they  are  to  be  dispelled,  not  by  collecting 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  177 

clouds,  but  by  piercing  and  scattering  them.  In 
the  dark  we  may  imagine  depths  and  heights  im- 
measurable, which,  if  a  torch  be  carried  right  before 
us,  we  find  it  easy  to  leap  across.  Much  of  what  we 
call  sublime  is  only  the  residue  of  infancy,  and  the 
worst  of  it."  Such  fancies  as  inspire  Wordsworth's 
famous  "Ode  on  the  Intimations  of  Immortality," 
with  all  their  unspeakable  power  to  charm  us,  do  not 
afford  the  mind  so  secure  a  resting-place  as  do  the 
words  above  quoted,  which  supply  the  vagrant  mind 
with  a  corrective  greatly  needed  in  an  age  over  which 
the  romantic  spirit  is  dominant.  Here  Landor  calls 
up  Wordsworth  by  contrast ;  by  the  association  of  re- 
semblance he  suggests  a  greater  than  Wordsworth, 
even  Goethe,  and  the  ripe  philosophy  of  the  closing 
pages  of  "Faust."  One  more  extract,  quoted  by 
Lord  Houghton  from  his  unique  copy  of  one  of  Lan- 
dor's  fugitive  writings,  may  be  given  in  illustration 
of  Landor's  religious  opinions. 

"I  have  nothing  to  say  on  any  man's  religion ;  and,  indeed,  where 
a  man  is  malignant  in  his  words  or  actions  his  creed  is  unim- 
portant to  others  and  unavailing  to  himself.  .  .  .  Whether  in 
the  Established  Church  the  last  consolations  of  religion  are 
quite  so  impressive  and  eflScacious;  whether  they  always  are 
administered  with  the  same  earnestness  and  tenderness  as  the 
parent  Church  administers  them,  is  a  question  which  I  should 
deem  it  irreverent  to  discuss.  Certainly  he  is  happiest  in  his 
death,  whose  fortitude  is  most  confiding  and  most  peaceful: 
whose  composure  rests  not  merely  on  the  suppression  of  doubts 
and  fears;  whose  pillow  is  raised  up,  whose  bosom  is  lightened, 
whose  mortality  is  loosened  from  him,  by  an  assemblage  of 
all  consolatory  hopes,  indescribable,  indistinguishable,  indefinite, 
yet  surer  than  ever  were  the  senses." 


178  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

The  secret  of  much  that  would  otherwise  be  per- 
plexing in  Landor's  work  and  influence  may  be 
found  in  the  simple  statement  that  he  was  a  classical 
poet  writing  in  a  romantic  age.  This  is  what  sets 
him  so  far  apart  from  his  contemporaries,  in  spite 
of  his  warm  friendship  for  many  of  them,  and  his 
generous  appreciation  of  their  work.  This  is  what 
made  him  exert  so  special  and  subtle  an  influence 
upon  his  fellow-poets,  an  influence  probably  greater 
than  Landor's  natural  gifts  would  have  made  possible 
had  he  himself  been  merely  one  among  the  brethren 
of  the  romantic  guild.  This  is  what  reduced  his 
audience  in  numbers,  and  enriched  it  in  quality,  so 
that  I  sometimes  think  his  chances  of  immortality  are 
better  than  those  of  certain  of  his  more  famous  con- 
temporaries. For  romantic  art  is  a  thing  of  fash- 
ions, of  shifting  phases  of  thought  and  imagination, 
of  moods  and  impulses  that  pass  away,  while  the  clas- 
sical art  which  Landor  represents  is  more  surely 
allied  with  the  enduring  aesthetic  interests  of  man- 
kind. Thus  it  is  that  Landor  seems  at  once  old- 
fashioned  and  ultra-modern,  that  his  workmanship 
now  recalls  that  of  the  Georgians  and  the  reign  of 
Queen  Anne,  and  now  suggests  the  later  Victorian 
style  that  arose  when  the  romantic  movement  began 
to  lose  something  of  its  energy.  Mr.  Stedman  is 
of  the  opinion  that,  "so  far  as  his  manner  was  any- 
thing save  his  own,  it  was  that  of  recent  years,  .  .  . 
that  the  popular  method  constantly  approached  Lan- 
dor's until  the  epoch  of  his  death."    In  "Gebir,"  this 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  179 


critic  finds  "the  prototype  of  our  modern  formation, 
cropping  out  a  great  distance  in  advance."  When 
we  call  Landor  a  classical  writer,  the  fact  that  his 
subjects  were  largely  drawn  from  classical  antiquity 
has  little  to  do  with  the  judgment.  It  is  not  the 
matter,  but  the  manner  of  his  work  that  makes  him 
a  classic.     The  classical  age  is  past,  Landor  writes, 

"But  poetry  may  reassume 
That  glorious  name  with  Tartar  and  with  Turk, 
With  Goth  or  Arab,  Sheik  or  Paladin, 
And  not  with  Roman  or  with  Greek  alone. 
The  name  is  graven  on  the  workmanship." 

Sidney  Colvin,  in  his  discussion  of  Landor's  manner, 
presents  the  distinction  between  the  classical  and 
the  romantic  ways  of  working  in  terms  so  admirable 
that  they  must  be  quoted. 

"In  classical  writing  every  idea  is  called  up  to  the  mind  as 
nakedly  as  possible,  and  at  the  same  time  as  distinctly;  it  is 
exhibited  in  white  light,  and  left  to  produce  its  effect  by  its 
own  unaided  power.  In  romantic  writing,  on  the  other  hand, 
all  objects  are  exhibited  as  it  were  through  a  coloured  and 
iridescent  atmosphere.  Round  about  every  central  idea  the 
romantic  writer  summons  up  a  cloud  of  accessory  and  subor- 
dinate ideas  for  the  sake  of  enhancing  its  effect,  if  at  the  risk 
of  confusing  its  outlines.  The  temper,  again,  of  the  romantic 
writer  is  one  of  excitement,  while  the  temper  of  the  classical 
writer  is  one  of  self-possession.  No  matter  what  the  power  of 
his  subject,  the  classical  writer  does  not  fail  to  assert  his 
mastery  over  it  and  over  himself,  while  the  romantic  writer 
seems  as  though  his  subject  were  ever  on  the  point  of  dazzling 
and  carrying  him  away.  On  the  one  hand  there  is  calm,  on  the 
other  hand  enthusiasm:  the  virtues  of  the  one  style  are  strength 
of   grasp,   with   clearness   and   justness   of   presentment:   the 


180  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

virtues  of  the  other  style  are  glow  of  spirit,  with  magic  and 
richness  of  suggestion." 

A  further  extremely  important  suggestion  made  by 
Mr.  Colvin  should  also  be  taken  into  account. 

"The  romantic  manner  lends  itself,  as  the  true  classical  does 
not,  to  inferior  work.  Second-rate  conceptions  excitedly  and 
approximately  put  into  words  derive  from  it  an  Ulusive  attrac- 
tion which  may  make  them  for  a  time,  and  \sith  all  but  the 
coolest  judges,  pass  as  first-rate.  Whereas  about  true  classical 
writing  there  can  be  no  illusion.  It  presents  to  us  conceptions 
calmly  realised  in  words  that  exactly  define  them,  conceptions 
depending  for  their  attraction,  not  on  their  halo,  but  on  them- 
selves." 

In  this  classical  bareness  of  stj^e  Landor  stood  alone 
among  his  English  contemporaries ;  for  anything  like 
a  close  comparison  we  must  go  to  Italian  literature 
and  the  tragedies  of  Alfieri,  between  whom  and  Lan- 
dor, both  in  literary  and  in  personal  character,  there 
are  many  points  of  resemblance.  Of  "Gebir,"  which 
exhibits  this  artistic  restraint  in  the  most  marked 
manner,  the  author  himself  wrote :  "I  am  certain  that 
I  rejected  what  almost  every  man  would  call  the 
best  part.  I  am  afraid  that  I  have  boiled  away  too 
much,  and  that  something  of  a  native  flavour  has  been 
lost  in  procuring  a  stronger  and  more  austere  one." 
The  concentration,  the  elliptical  method,  the  auster- 
ity of  manner  which  this  poem  exemplifies,  are  such 
that  it  does  not  seem  best  to  give  any  considerable 
extract  from  it  by  way  of  illustration.  Instead  of 
resorting    to    "Gebir,"    I    will    take    the    poem    of 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  181 

"Iphigeneia  and  Agamemnon,"  equally  severe  in  de- 
sign, but  simpler  and  more  direct  in  expression. 

"Iphigeneia,  when  she  heard  her  doom 
At  Aulis,  and  when  all  beside  the  King 
Had  gone  away,  took  his  right  hand,  and  said, 
*0  father.    I  am  young  and  very  happy. 
I  do  not  think  the  pious  Calchas  heard 
Distinctly  what  the  Goddess  spake.    Old-age 
Obscures  the  senses.    If  my  nurse,  who  knew 
My  voice  so  well,  sometimes  misunderstood 
While  I  was  resting  on  her  knee  both  arms 
And  hitting  it  to  make  her  mind  my  words. 
And  looking  in  her  face,  and  she  in  mine. 
Might  he  not  also  hear  one  word  amiss. 
Spoken  from  so  far  oif,  even  from  Olympus?' 
The  father  placed  his  cheek  upon  her  head. 
And  tears  dropt  down  it,  but  the  king  of  men 
Replied  not.    Then  the  maiden  spake  once  more. 
'O  father!  sayst  thou  nothing?    Hear'st  thou  not 
Me,  whom  thou  ever  hast,  until  this  hour, 
Listened  to  fondly,  and  awakened  me 
To  hear  my  voice  amid  the  voice  of  birds. 
When  it  was  inarticulate  as  theirs, 
And  the  down  deadened  it  within  the  nest?* 
He  moved  her  gently  from  him,  silent  still. 
And  this,  and  this  alone,  brought  tears  from  her, 
Although  she  saw  fate  nearer:  then  with  sighs, 
'I  thought  to  have  laid  down  my  hair  before 
Benignant  Artemis,  and  not  have  dimmed 
Her  polisht  altar  with  my  virgin  blood; 
I  thought  to  have  selected  the  white  flowers 
To  please  the  Nymphs,  and  to  have  asked  of  each 
By  name,  and  with  no  sorrowful  regret. 
Whether,  since  both  my  parents  willed  the  change, 
I  might  at  Hymen's  feet  bend  my  dipt  brow; 
And  (after  those  who  mind  us  girls  the  most) 
Adore  our  own  Athena,  that  she  would 


182  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

Regard  me  mildly  with  her  azure  eyes. 

But,  father !  to  see  you  no  more,  and  see 

Your  love,  O  father !  go  ere  I  am  gone.' 

Gently  he  moved  her  oflF,  and  drew  her  back. 

Bending  his  lofty  head  far  over  hers. 

And  the  dark  depths  of  nature  heaved  and  burst. 

He  turned  away;  not  far,  but  silent  still. 

She  now  first  shuddered;  for  in  him,  so  nigh. 

So  long  a  silence  seemed  the  approach  of  death. 

And  like  it.     Once  again  she  raised  her  voice. 

*0  father!  if  the  ships  are  now  detained. 

And  all  your  vows  move  not  the  Gods  above. 

When  the  knife  strikes  me  there  will  be  one  prayer 

Tlie  less  to  them:    and  purer  can  there  be 

Any,  or  more  fervent  than  the  daughter's  prayer 

For  her  dear  father's  safetj^  and  success?' 

A  groan  that  shook  him  shook  not  his  resolve. 

An  aged  man  now  entered,  and  without 

One  word,  stept  slowly  on,  and  took  the  wrist 

Of  the  pale  maiden.     She  looked  up,  and  saw 

The  fillet  of  the  priest  and  calm  cold  eyes. 

Then  turned  she  where  her  parent  stood,  and  cried: 

'O  father !  grieve  no  more :  the  ships  can  sail.' " 

If  there  be  anywhere  in  English  literature  a  poem  of 
more  serene  and  flawless  beauty  than  this,  I,  for  one, 
should  not  know  where  to  look  for  it.  But  the  poem 
is  strictly  classical  in  style,  off*ering  no  romantic 
allurements  to  the  sense,  and  its  appeal  is  obviously 
made  to  a  limited  class  of  readers  of  refinement.  Lan- 
dor  is  the  poet's  poet  among  moderns,  as  Spenser  is 
the  poet's  poet  among  EHzabethans.  It  is  not  proba- 
ble that  he  will  ever  be  a  widely  popular  poet.  In 
spite  of  Lowell's  dictum  that,  save  Shakespeare  alone, 
no  other  writer  of  English  "has  furnished  us  with  so 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  183 

many  delicate  aphorisms  of  human  nature,"  his 
phrases  have  never  found  general  currency.  Bart- 
lett's  "Familiar  Quotations"  leaves  Landor  but  poorly 
represented,  although  one  might  reasonably  expect 
to  find  such  lines  as  "We  are  what  suns  and 
winds  and  waters  make  us,"  and  "Grief  hunts  us  down 
the  precipice  of  years,"  and  the  phrase  descriptive  of 
that  "world  of  memories  and  sighs"  consecrated  to 
Rose  Aylmer.  But  in  spite  of  this  neglect,  it  may 
at  least  be  said  that  Landor  has  held  his  own,  and 
the  surprisingly  large  sales  of  the  recent  editions  of 
certain  of  his  writings  even  justify  the  assertion  that 
he  has  been  gaining  ground. 

Swinburne  has  constituted  himself  Landor's  eulo- 
gist-in-chief for  our  modern  generation,  and  it  is  not 
the  least  among  the  many  services  done  for  the  crit- 
icism of  English  literature  by  the  one  great  poet 
who  has  survived  the  past  century  that  he  has 
directed  our  attention,  both  in  and  out  of  season,  so 
frequently  and  with  such  generous  appreciation,  to 
the  rightful  claims  of  this  great  master  of  verse  and 
prose.  I  have  already  quoted  from  his  memorial 
verses  written  just  after  Landor's  death,  from  his 
article  on  Landor  written  for  the  "Encyclopaedia 
Britannica,"  and  from  his  "Song  for  the  Centenary 
of  Walter  Savage  Landor."  This  latter  poem,  ex- 
tending to  upwards  of  fifty  pages,  is  a  catalogue 
raisonne  of  a  large  number  of  Landor's  writings, 
and  goes  to  the  extreme  of  panegyric  as  one  work 
after  another  is  reviewed.     The  praise  must  be  taken 


184  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

with  some  qualifications,  but,  for  my  part,  such  un- 
restrained enthusiasm  is  more  grateful  than  criticism 
of  the  carping  sort  which  fixes  its  eye  chiefly  upon 
Lander's  defects.    If  we  hesitate  to  call  Landor 

"The  mightiest  heart  since  Milton's  leapt. 
The  gentlest  since  the  gentlest  heart  of  Shakspeare  slept," 

we  may  at  least  agree  that, 

"All  sweet,  all  sacred,  all  heroic  things. 

All  generous  names  and  loyal,  and  all  wise. 
With  all  his  heart  in  all  its  wayfarings 
He  sought,  and  worshipped." 

Nor  did  criticism  ever  strike  with  more  unerring  aim 
to  the  very  centre  of  its  target  than  in  the  often 
quoted  lines  which  tell  us  how,  in  the  verse  of  Landor, 

"Through  the  trumpet  of  a  child  of  Rome 
Rang  the  pure  music  of  the  flutes  of  Greece." 

This  is  the  final  word  upon  Landor's  relations  to 
classical  antiquity.  But  of  all  Swinburne's  tributes 
to  Landor  the  finest  of  all,  although  probably  the 
least  familiar,  is  that  embodied  in  the  poem  "Thalas- 
sius."  Here  the  poet  writes  his  spiritual  autobiog- 
raphy, picturing  himself  as  a  flower  bom  of  the  sea, 
and  found  and  fostered  by  the  spirit  of  Landor. 

"But  he  that  found  the  sea  flower  by  the  sea 
And  took  to  foster  like  a  graft  of  earth 
Was  born  of  man's  most  highest  and  heavenliest  birth. 
Free-born  as  winds  and  stars  and  waves  are  free; 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  185 

A  warrior  grey  with  glories  more  than  years, 
Though  more  of  years  than  change  the  quick  to  dead 
Had  rained  their  light  and  darkness  on  his  head; 
A  singer  that  in  time's  and  memory's  ears 
Should  leave  such  words  to  sing  as  all  his  peers 
Might  praise  with  hallowing  heat  of  rapturous  tears 
Till  all  the  days  of  human  flight  were  fled." 

[And  from  the  song  of  his  spiritual  foster-father  the 
child  learned  the  love  of  all  things  lovely,  and  the 
hate  of  all  things  hateful,  and  the  hope  "that  can 
see  what  earth  beholds  not,"  and  the  "fear  to  be 
Worthless  the  dear  love  of  the  wind  and  sea  That 
bred  him  fearless."  And  highest  of  all  the  lessons 
that  the  master  taught  him  was  this : 

"How  the  breath 
Too  frail  for  life  may  be  more  strong  than  death; 
And  this  poor  flash  of  sense  in  life,  that  gleams 
As  a  ghost's  glory  in  dreams, 

More  stabile  than  the  world's  own  heart's  root  seems. 
By  that  strong  faith  of  lordliest  love  which  gives 
To  death's  own  sightless-seeming  eyes  a  light 
Clearer,  to  death's  bare  bones  a  verier  might. 
Than  shines  or  strikes  from  any  man  that  lives. 
How  he  that  loves  life  overmuch  shall  die 
The  dog's  death,  utterly; 
And  he  that  much  less  loves  it  than  he  hates 
All  wrongdoing  that  is  done 
Anywhere  always  underneath  the  sun 
Shall  live  a  mightier  life  than  time's  or  fate's. 
One  fairer  thing  he  showed  him,  and  in  might 
More  strong  than  day  and  night 
Whose  strengths  build  up  time's  towering  period; 
Yea,  one  thing  stronger  and  more  high  than  God, 
Which  if  man  had  not,  then  should  God  not  be: 
And  that  was  Liberty. 


186  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

And  gladly  should  man  die  to  gain,  he  said. 
Freedom;  and  gladlier,  having  lost,  lie  dead. 
For  man's  earth  was  not,  nor  the  sweet  sea-waves 
His,  nor  his  own  land,  nor  its  very  graves, 
Except  they  bred  not,  bore  not,  hid  not  slaves: 
But  all  of  all  that  is, 
Were  one  man  free  in  body  and  soul,  were  his.'* 

The  essential  message  of  Landor,  thus  interpreted 
with  profound  and  generous  sympathy  by  his  disci- 
ples, is  one  of  the  most  inspiring  to  be  found  in 
the  whole  range  of  English  poetry.  Its  ethical  import 
is  so  weighty,  its  form  of  utterance  so  large  and 
noble,  its  fundamental  truth  so  absolute,  that  it  will 
be  cherished  by  souls  fit  to  receive  it  as  long  as 
English  poetry  endures.  "My  writings  are  not 
upon  slate,"  Landor  once  wrote,  with  that  proud 
self-consciousness  which  in  a  man  less  great 
than  he  would  savour  of  egotism,  "no  finger,  not 
of  Time  himself,  who  dips  it  in  the  clouds  of 
years  and  in  the  storm  and  tempest,  can  efface 
the  written." 

One  would  have  to  search  far  through  the  history 
of  literature  to  find  another  contrast  as  sharp  as 
that  which  exists  between  Landor  the  man  and  Landor 
the  poet.  The  inner  personality  which  addresses 
us  through  the  medium  of  his  verse  and  imaginative 
prose  has  little  suggestion  of  the  outer  personality 
which  confronts  us  in  his  biography.  The  caricature 
of  the  man,  which  one  of  the  novels  of  Dickens  has 
made  familiar  to  the  general  reading  public,  seems, 
to  one  acquainted  with  the  writer  alone,  absolutely 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  187 

unreconcilable  with  the  testimony  of  Lander's  many 
printed  pages.  Even  allowing  for  the  fact  that  the 
figure  drawn  by  Dickens  is  a  caricature  of  the  broad- 
est type,  we  still  find  it  difficult  to  see  how  the  Boy- 
thorn  of  the  novel  can  be  one  and  the  same  person 
with  the  author  of  "The  Hellenics"  and  "Pericles  and 
Aspasia."  Yet  the  conjunction  of  impulsive  and 
violent  passion  with  an  almost  infinite  tenderness  of 
heart,  to  which  the  caricature  of  the  novelist  reduces, 
seems  to  have  been  exactly  the  conjunction  which  was 
known  to  Landor's  friends.  It  is  illustrated  by  the 
story,  presumably  apocryphal  yet  not  without  essen- 
tial verisimilitude,  according  to  which  Landor  one 
day  threw  an  offending  servant  out  of  the  window, 
and  then  remorsefully  exclaimed:  "My  God!  I  for- 
got the  violets."  Mr.  Sidney  Colvin  calls  Landor's 
inner  personality  "that  of  a  stately  and  benign  phi- 
losopher, the  outer  that  of  a  passionate  and  rebel- 
lious schoolboy,"  and  goes  on  to  say  "that  Landor's 
inner  and  nobler  self  had  little  hold  on  or  government 
over  his  other  self  must  be  admitted.  From  his  na- 
ture's central  citadel,  to  use  a  mediaeval  figure,  of 
Pride,  High  Contemplation,  and  Honourable  Pur- 
pose, he  failed  to  keep  ward  over  its  outlying  arsenals 
of  Wrath,  which  haste  and  mis  judgment  were  for- 
ever wantonly  igniting,  to  the  ruin  of  his  own 
fortunes,  and  the  dismay  of  his  neighbours  and  well- 
wishers."  The  contrast  between  the  two  Landors  is 
well  set  forth  by  Lord  Houghton,  who  knew  them 
both,  in  the  following  terms: 


188  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

"By  the  side  of,  or  rather  above,  the  impulsive,  reckless, 
creature,  there  was  the  critical,  humorous,  nature,  as  well  aware 
of  its  own  defect  as  any  enemy  could  be,  ever  strong  enough  to 
show  and  probe  the  wound,  but  impotent  to  heal  it,  and  pathet- 
ically striving  to  remed)',  through  the  judgments  of  the  intel- 
lect, the  faults  and  the  miseries  of  the  living  actor.  Thus 
nowhere  in  the  range  of  the  English  language  are  the  glory 
and  happiness  of  moderation  of  mind  more  nobly  preached 
and  powerfully  illustrated  than  in  the  writings  of  this  most 
intemperate  man;  nowhere  is  the  sacredness  of  the  placid  life 
more  hallowed  and  honoured  than  in  the  utterances  of  this 
tossed  and  troubled  spirit;  nowhere  are  heroism  and  self- 
sacrifice  and  forgiveness  more  eloquently  adored  than  by  this 
intense  and  fierce  individuality,  which  seemed  unable  to  forget 
for  an  instant  its  own  claims,  its  own  wrongs,  its  own  fancied 
superiority  over  all  its  fellow-men." 

The  legend  which  grew  up  about  Landor,  both  in 
England  and  on  the  Continent,  was  both  varied  and 
picturesque.  The  incidents  which  it  included  had 
some  slight  foundation  of  fact,  but  became  gro- 
tesquely distorted  as  they  passed  from  mouth  to 
mouth.  It  was  told  of  him,  for  example,  that  he  had 
been  expelled  from  school  after  thrashing  the  head 
master,  who  disagreed  with  him  on  the  subject  of  a 
Latin  quantity,  that  he  had  been  removed  from  the 
university  because  he  had  taken  a  shot  at  one  of  the 
college  fellows  who  had  annoyed  him,  that  he  had 
been  banished  from  England  for  knocking  down  a 
barrister  who  had  cross-examined  him,  that  when  the 
authorities  of  Como  charged  him  with  libel  he  threat- 
ened them  all  with  a  fine  thrashing  (una  hella  bas- 
tonata),  that  in  Florence  he  had  challenged  the  Sec- 
retary of  the  English  Legation  for  whistling  in  the 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  189 

street  when  Mrs.  Landor  passed,  and  that  he  was 
banished  from  Florence  for  taking  a  bag  of  coin  into 
the  courtroom  one  day,  and  asking  how  much  he 
must  pay  for  a  favourable  verdict.  These  stories, 
and  many  others,  were  related  about  him,  and  lost 
nothing  in  the  telling.  All  Englishmen  are  mad,  runs 
the  Italian  proverb,  and  the  Italians  of  Como  and  Pisa 
and  Florence  must  have  thought  Landor  about  the 
maddest  specimen  of  his  race  that  they  had  even  seen. 
To  use  a  familiar  phrase,  he  kept  himself  in  hot  water 
during  the  greater  part  of  his  life,  engaging,  as 
Mr.  Stedman  says,  "at  eighty-two  in  a  quixotic  war- 
fare with  people  immeasurably  beneath  him,  and 
sending  forth  epigrams,  like  some  worn-out,  crazy 
warrior  toying  with  the  bow-and-arrows  of  his  child- 
hood." It  is  unpleasant  to  dwell  upon  these  acci- 
dents of  Landor's  life,  and  we  turn  from  them  with 
relief  to  the  writings  in  which  his  better  and  truer 
self  stands  revealed.  We  turn  with  especial  pleasure 
and  satisfaction  to  those  verses  which  embody  his 
serene  self-assurance,  in  which  his  calm  acceptance  of 
whatever  life  may  bring  to  him  finds  expression,  in 
which  he  faces  old  age  and  death  with  dignity  of 
soul.  ^^Nur  die  Ltimpen  s'lnd  bescheiden/'  says 
Goethe,  and  Landor,  like  Goethe,  was  neither  the  one 
nor  the  other.  His  scorn  of  the  mob  was  such  that 
he  never  sought  to  win  its  applause,  and  his  attitude 
toward  the  masses  of  mankind  had  no  slight  resem- 
blance to  the  attitude  of  Shakespeare's  Coriolanus 
toward  the  Roman  populace.    He  said  in  the  preface 


190  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 

to  "Gebir":  "If  there  are  now  in  England  ten  men 
of  taste  and  genius  who  will  applaud  my  poem,  I 
declare  myself  fully  content.  I  will  call  for  a  divi- 
sion. I  shall  count  a  majority."  He  wrote  to  Parr: 
"I  never  court  the  vulgar,  and  how  immense  a  ma- 
jority of  every  rank  and  description  this  happy  word 
comprises  !  Perhaps  about  thirty  in  the  universe  may 
be  excepted,  and  never  more  at  a  time."  In  the  lines 
addressed  to  Joseph  Ablett,  he  said: 

"I  never  courted  friends  or  Fame; 
She  pouted  at  me  long,  at  last  she  came. 
And  threw  her  arms  around  my  neck  and  said, 
'Take  what  hath  been  for  years  delay'd, 
And  fear  not  that  the  leaves  will  fall 
One  hour  the  earlier  from  thy  coronal.' " 

He  welcomed  the  decline  of  life  with  the  reflection 
that 

"He  who  hath  braved  Youth's  dizzy  heat 
Dreads  not  the  frost  of  age." 

The  imminence  of  death  found  him  resigned,  but  no 
less  erect  than  ever  in  spiritual  stature. 

"Death  stands  above  me,  whispering  low 
I  know  not  what  into  my  ear: 
Of  his  strange  language  all  I  know 
Is,  there  is  not  a  word  of  fear." 

The  most  finished  and  faultless  of  all  these  epigram- 
matic confessions  is  the  quatrain  which  is  more  fre- 
quently quoted,  perhaps,  than  any  other  of  Landor's 
verses,  the  quatrain  with  which  this  summary  of  his 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  191 

essential   aims    and    aspirations    may   most   fitly   be 

closed : 

"I  strove  with  none;  for  none  was  worth  my  strife, 
Nature  I  loved,  and  next  to  Nature,  Art; 
I  warmed  both  hands  before  the  fire  of  life. 
It  sinks  and  I  am  ready  to  depart." 


IRobert  Browntng 

It  was  in  the  year  1850,  the  central  year  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  that  the  laurel  which  England 
bestows,  sometimes  worthily  and  sometimes  unworth- 
ily, upon  the  poet  chosen  for  this  distinction,  passed 
"from  the  brows  of  him  that  uttered  nothing  base" 
to  the  brows  of  him  whose  work,  already  outshining 
that  of  all  his  contemporaries,  was  destined  to  grow 
still  further  in  the  graces  of  power  and  of  wisdom, 
and  to  rule  with  unrivalled  domination  the  poetic 
thought  of  the  Victorian  period.  The  year  in  ques- 
tion thus  marks  a  dividing  line  of  more  than  ordinary 
significance.  Of  the  six  great  poets  who  had  made  the 
first  half  of  the  century  memorable,  Landor  alone 
remained  among  the  living.  Of  the  six  great  poets 
who  were  to  make  the  second  half  of  the  century  al- 
most equally  memorable,  only  two  had  been  heard  at 
all,  and  only  one  of  those  two  had  become  really 
famous.  The  separation  between  the  two  groups  of 
poets  is  thus  almost  complete;  by  the  middle  of  the 
century  a  generation  had  arisen  that  had  forgotten 
Byron  and  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth,  that  had 
hardly  learned  to  know  Keats  and  Shelley  and  Lan- 
dor. New  forms  of  human  and  artistic  and  intel- 
lectual interest,  moreover,  were  calling  for  expression 

193 


ROBERT  BROWNING  193 

in  English  poetry,  and  the  voices  of  the  past,  even 
when  heeded  with  all  due  reverence,  were  no  longer 
adequate  to  interpret  the  new  interests,  the  new 
dreams  and  aspirations,  of  the  mid-Victorian  age. 
Thg  revolutionary  movement,  though  fanned  into 
renewed  flame  on  the  Continent,  had  ceased  to  influ- 
ence strongly  the  English  mind.  The  essential  ob- 
jects of  the  Revolution  had  already  been  in  large 
measure  attained,  as  far  as  England  was  concerned, 
and  what  remained  to'*be^accomplijhed  for  the  cause 
of  liberalism,  for  representative  government  and  in- 
dividual  freedom,  was  being  gradually  brought  about 
in  the  cautious  and  undemonstrative  English  fashion. 
Even  the  great  year  of  1848,  the  year  of  violent  and 
spectacular  outbursts  in  Germany  and  Austria,  in 
France  and  Italy,  witnessed  no  more  serious  disturb- 
ance of  the  English  social  structure  than  was  occa- 
sioned by  the  Chartist  agitators.  The  "red  fool- 
fury  of  the  Seine"  could  find  no  counterpart  by  the 
peaceful  banks  of  the  Thames,  and  the  political  and 
social  developments  of  this  period  in  England  seem 
tame  and  uninspiring  when  contrasted  with  the  pas- 
sions that  were  stirring  the  rest  of  Europe.  The 
new  poetry  was  constrained  to  find  its  subject-matter, 
as  far  as  that  subject-matter  was  provided  by  exist- 
ing conditions,  not  in  the  pageant  of  warfare  and 
the  clash  of  revolutionary  forces,  but  rather  in  the 
unfolding  of  the  new  social  order,  the  conquests  of 
the  new  scientific  thought,  jthe  ardours  of  jthe  new 
religious^awakening,  and_the  inspiration  of  the  new 


194  ROBERT  BROWNING 

insiprht  into  the  complex  workings  of  the  human  soul. 
These  wey^  the  essential  themes  that  were  destined 
to  occupy  and  to  c on tjjoLlhe  thought^ f  Browning, 
Tennyson,  and  Arnold;  in  somewhat  lesser  degree, 
and  alHed  with  certain  special  personal  interests, 
they  were  destined  to  occupy  and  control  the  thought 
of  Rossetti,  Morris,  and  Swinburne. 

Preoccupied  as  our  modern  poets  have  been,  how- 
ever, with  the  happenings  of  their  own  period, 
ihe^  ^could  not  escap^e^  the  shaping  influence 
of  their  immediate  predecessors.  In  this  respect 
they  are  unhke  the  poets  of  the  earlier  group. 
Our  romantic  poets  of  the  first  half  of  the 
century  made  so  complete  a  break  from  the 
traditions  and  the  ideals  of  the  artificial  period 
stretching  behind  them  that  they  almost  seemed  to 
have  started  poetry  over  again,  much  as  the  Revolu- 
tion seemed  to  aim  at  starting  human  society  over 
again.  Whatever  inspiration  they  received  from 
the  past  they  took  from  Milton,  and  the  Elizabethans, 
and  the  ancients,  repudiating  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury and  all  its  works.  Byron  alone  offers  a  seeming 
exception  to  this  generalisation,  but  even  his  fre- 
quently confessed  allegiance  to  the  school  of  Pope 
was  not  the  true  index  of  his  poetical  character. 
Between  the  early  romantic  poets  and  our  modern 
semi-romantic  ones,  on  the  other  hand,  there  was 
nothing  like  so  complete  a  break  as  has  just  been  in- 
stanced. Tennyson  was  strongly  influenced  by  Byron 
and  Keats,  Browning  by  Shelley,  Arnold  by  Words- 


ROBERT  BROWNING  195 

worth,  Rossetti  by  Keats  and  Coleridge,  and  Swin- 
burne by  Shelley  and  Landor.  Morris  alone  seems 
to  have  been  measurably  free  from  the  influence  of 
our  early  nineteenth-century  poets ;  he  alone,  in  his 
sympathy  for  the  mediaeval  spirit,  went  back  to 
Chaucer  for  his  inspiration — that  is,  as  far  back 
as  it  was  possible  to  go  in  English  poetry, — and  even 
beyond  Chaucer  to  the  writers  of  the  primitive  age 
of  epic  and  romance  and  early  Christian  legend. 

Professor  Herford,  at  the  close  of  his  admirable 
little  book  upon  "The  Age  of  Wordsworth,"  thus 
speaks  of  the  relations  of  Landor  toward  the  poetry 
of  the  new  age  into  which  his  life  was  prolonged : 

"His  region  was  man;  but  it  was  neither  the  abstract  Man  of 
Shelley,  nor  the  simplified  and,  as  it  were,  sifted  Man  of 
Wordsworth;  as  little  was  it  the  heterogeneous  and  motley- 
throng  that  Scott's  vast  sympathetic  imagination  gathered  in 
from  the  tavern  and  the  castle,  the  hovel  and  the  throne:  it  was 
the  procession  of  the  distinguished  and  significant  souls  of 
all  nations  and  times,  the  expressive  types  or  articulate  ex- 
ponents of  the  energies  of  the  civilised  world.  Comparatively 
isolated  as  Landor  was,  however,  it  was  in  the  direction  of  his 
lonely  outpost  that  the  area  of  poetical  sensibility  was,  during 
the  age  of  Wordsworth,  being  slowly  enlarged.  And  the  poetry 
of  the  next  generation,  of  which  Landor  witnessed  the  entire 
compass,  was  a  continuous  efi'ort  to  gather  in  the  harvest  of  this 
wider  area, — to  give  imaginative  expression  not  only  to  the 
elemental  emotions  of  men.  Earth's  common  growth  of  mirth 
and  tears,  but  to  the  complexities  of  the  cultivated  intellect, 
and  its  infinitely  varied  modes  of  impressing  its  own  rhythms 
upon  the  dance  of  plastic  circumstance,  in  art  and  science,  in 
statecraft  and  citizenship,  in  philosophy  and  religion.  Here 
Landor  lived  to  see,  and,  with  his  royal  incapacity  for  envy, 
to  rejoice  in  seeing,  his  work  continued  and  surpassed,  by  one 


196  ROBERT  BROWNING 

who  added  to  an  intellect  as  ample  and  fertile  as  his  own  the 
imagination  of  Shelley;  and  who,  armed  with  keen  psycho- 
logical insight,  and  with  a  divining  faith  as  ardent  and  illumin- 
ing as  Shelley's  in  'the  Love  whose  smile  kindles  the  universe,' 
wrought  the  very  souls  of  men  into  the  woof  of  poetry." 

How  Browning  befriended  Landor  in  those  last  soli- 
tary Florentine  years  of  the  old  Roman  is  one  of 
the  most  touching  incidents  in  modern  Hterary  biog- 
raphy. The  transition  from  Landor  to  Browning  is 
thus  made  a  natural  one,  both  by  external  and  by 
internal  circumstance,  for  Professor  Herford  is  right 
when  he  says:  "The  last  great  survivor  of  the  age 
of  Wordsworth  was  nearest  of  kin  to  the  more  orig; 
inal  of  its  two  great  inheritors  in  poetry,  and  the 
torch  passes  visibly  from  hand  to  hand  in  the  sym- 
bolical friendship  of  Landor  with  Robert  Browning." 
The  verses  with  which  Landor  welcomed  Browning  to 
the  company  of  English  poets  are  well  known. 

"Since  Chaucer  was  alive  and  hale. 
No  man  hath  walk'd  along  our  roads  with  step 
So  active,  so  inquiring  eye,  or  tongue 
So  varied  in  discourse." 

There  is  sound  criticism  in  these  words,  for  they 
seize  upon  Browning's  most  salient  intellectual  char- 
acteristics. How  active  was  his  step,  how  inquiring 
his  eye,  how  varied  his  discourse  upon  all  that  con- 
cerns life  and  art,  the  relations  of  men  with  one 
another  and  the  recesses  of  the  individual  soul,  is 
now  known  by  all  readers,  as  it  was  gradually  being 


ROBERT  BROWNING  197 

discovered   by   discerning   minds   at   the   time   when 
Lander's  words  were  written. 

Thejjgflucnce  exercjsH  ^y  ftbgjW"  upon  the  direc- 
tion of  "Ry^^riPg^g   gpTTTTn^,]   Iwrj^^flg  sn  grPRl— IhhflT'"' 

it  becomes  one  of  the  ftr»^-4kin^s_toJj£^nsidered 
in  our  attempt  to  set  forth  the_fuiidamentaL_attj^" 
butes  of  Browning's  thoyght.  His  one  important 
piece  of  prose  writing,  from  which  considerable  ex- 
tracts were  made  in  an  earher  chapter,  was  a  glorifi- 
cation of  the  genius  of  Shelley.  The  "Memorabilia" 
with  which  readers  of  Browning  are  so  familiar  is  a 
tribute  to  the  memory  of  Shelley  all  the  more  im-^ 
pressive  for  the  naive  simplicity  of  its  diction.  Buty 
the  most  important  record  of  Browning's  feeling 
toward  the  poet  who  brought  to  his  own  song  its  chief 
inspiration  is  found  in  "Pauline,"  written  at  a  time 
when  the  influence  of  the  master  was  fresh  and  won- 
derful. There  are  more  reasons  than  one  why  we 
should  be  grateful  to  Rossetti  for  having  discovered 
this  neglected  poem  some  twenty  years  after  its 
pubhcation,  transcribing  it  for  his  own  delight.  But 
the  chief  of  these  reasons  seems  to  me  that  Brown- 
ing's apostrophe  to  Shelley  was  thereby  recovered 
for  English  poetry. 

"Sun-treader,  life  and  light  be  thine  forever! 
Thou  art  gone  from  us;  years  go  by  and  spring 
Gladdens  and  the  young  earth  is  beautiful. 
Yet  thy  songs  come  not,  other  bards  arise. 
But  none  like  thee:  they  stand,  thy  majesties, 
Like  mighty  works  which  tell  some  spirit  there 
Hath  sat  regardless  of  neglect  and  scorn. 


198  ROBERT  BROWNING 

Till,  its  long  task  completed,  it  hath  risen 
And  left  us,  never  to  return,  and  all 
Rush  in  to  peer  and  praise  when  all  in  vain 
The  air  seems  bright  with  thy  past  presence  yet, 
But  thou  art  still  for  me  as  thou  hast  been 
When  I  have  stood  with  thee  as  on  a  throne 
With  all  thy  dim  creations  gathered  round 
Like  mountains,  and  I  felt  of  mould  like  them. 
And  with  them  creatures  of  my  own  were  mixed. 
Like  things  half-lived,  catching  and  giving  life." 

And  then  the  young  poet  goes  on,  analysing  his  own 
emotions,  and  recounting  his  spiritual  struggles,  his 
search  for  a  guiding  clue  through  the  thickets  of  life, 
until  his  choice  finally  fell 

"Not  so  much  on  a  system  as  on  a  man — 
On  one,  whom  praise  of  mine  shall  not  offend. 
Who  was  as  calm  as  beauty,  being  such 
Unto  mankind  as  thou  to  me,  Pauline, — 
Believing  in  them  and  devoting  all 
His  soul's  strength  to  their  winning  back  to  peace; 
Who  sent  forth  hopes  and  longings  for  their  sake 
Clothed  in  all  passion's  melodies.  .  .  . 

Soon  the  orb 
Of  his  conceptions  dawned  on  me;  its  praise 
Lives  in  the  tongues  of  men,  men's  brows  are  high 
When  his  name  means  a  triumph  and  a  pride. 
So,  my  weak  voice  may  well  forbear  to  shame 
What  seemed  decreed  my  fate:  I  threw  myself 
To  meet  it,  I  was  vowed  to  liberty. 
Men  were  to  be  as  Gods  and  earth  as  heaven. 
And  I — ah,  what  a  life  was  mine  to  prove!     * 
My  whole  soul  rose  to  meet  it." 

At  the  end  of  the  poem,  Shelley  is  once  more  invoked, 
and  called  upon  to  hear  the  poet's  confession  of  faith. 


ROBERT  BROWNING  199 

"Sun-treader,  I  believe  in  God  and  truth 
And  love;  and  as  one  just  escaped  from  death 
Would  bind  himself  in  bands  of  friends  to  feel, 
He  lives  indeed,  so,  I  would  lean  on  thee ! 
Thou  must  be  ever  with  me,  most  in  gloom 
If  such  must  come,  but  chiefly  when  I  die, 
For  I  seem,  dying,  as  one  going  in  the  dark 
To  fight  a  giant:  but  live  thou  forever, 
And  be  to  all  what  thou  hast  been  to  me !" 

The  well-intentioned  efforts  of  the  Browning  So- 
cieties have  made  much  of  the  so-called  philosophy  of 
their  poet,  and  have  found  in  hi,:  work  a  complex  sys- 
tem of  thought  which  has  amused  no  one  more  tha^  it 
amused  Browning  himself.  I  believe  it  is  fair  to  say 
that  few  great  poets  have  had  the  philosophical 
mind  in  less  degree  than  Browning.  Coleridge  and 
Wordsworth  among  his  predecessors,  Arnold  and 
Tennyson  among  his  contemporaries,  were  poets  of 
a  philosophical  type  much  more  distinctly  than 
Browning  was ;  something  at  least  approximating  to 
a  definite  and  coherent  system  of  thought  may  be 
found  in  their  writings,  but  Brownjing  rpmained.  to 
the  end  a  po^iin-whomJJiexational  temper  was  mas- 
tered  by  the  emotional^  a  poet  of  impulse,  of  un- 
reasoning optimism^and^jof^e^^  faith.  The 
declaration  quoted  a  few  lines  back  from  the  first 
of  his  published  poems.  *^I  believe  in  God  pinr*  ^-^"^•^ 
and  love,"  represents  the  substance  of  his  creed.  He 
found- many  strange  modes  of  expression  for  these 
simple  convictions,  and  elaborated  them  in  so  many 
guises  that  his  devotees  find  it  difficult  to  believe  that 


200  ROBERT  BROWNING 

his  teachings  reduce  to  so  elementary  a  formula. 
Browning's  theistic  faith,  says  Professor  Royce,  was 
"never  a  philosophy,  always  an  intuition,  but  freely 
illustrated  from  experience,  and  insistently  pondered 
through  long  and  manifold  arguments.  By  this  faith 
henief,  in  his  own  way,  the  problems  set  before  him 
not  onbL-by  life.f  but  by  thfl^  pvfrpmpiy  ynmplPY 
product  of  tradition,  the  Christian  conception  of 
God.'^  When  he  said,  "I  believe  in  God  and  truth 
and  love,"  he  was  stating  a  single  proposition  rather 
than  three  separate  ones.  For  him,  God  was  one 
and  the  same  thing  with  both  truth  and  lOveT"  NOKe 
of  the  narrow  dogmatisms  of  theology  had  power  to 
arrest  his  thought  in  its  soaring  flight  toward  that 
philosophical  synthesis  which,  for  want  of  a  better 
name,  is  called  monism.  Whatever  path  his  thought 
might  take,  it  pVfftry^  rftftch^d  nnt  toward  thnt  flhr 
stract  conception  of  Deity  which  merges  the  Creator 
with  the  creation,  and  has  for  the  object  of  its 
worship  that  soul  of  the  universe  which  intuition  ap- 
prehends, but  which  baffles  the  attempts  of  reason 
to  demonstrate.  To  quote  again  from  Professor 
Royce,  "The  road  Godwards  is  for  Browning  the 
same,  whoever  it  is  that  wanders  over  that  lonely 
path  or  pauses  by  the  wayside  after  obtaining  a  dis- 
tant view  of  the  goal,  or  traitorously  abandons  the 
quest,  or  reaches  at  last  the  moment  of  blowing  the 
slughorn  before  the  Dark  Tower."  Certainly  there 
was  nothing  anthropomorphic  about  Browning's  con- 
ception of  God.     What  he  thought  of  the  instinct 


ROBERT  BROWNING  201 

that  impels  men  to  fashion  God  after  their  own  image 
ismade"  clear^eAough  in  "Cahban  on  Setebos."  His 
two  names  for  the  Creator  were^ower  and  Love 


2^ 


and  th6  latter  of  Inese  two^ooms  much  the  larger 
in  his  conception.  But  "love  includes  strenuous- 
ness;  therefore,  the  hunKnr  lover  must  be  otten  far 
from  his  goal,  embarked  on  a  dark  quest,  and  so 
at  war  with  power.*'  Thus  we  are  brought  face  to 
face  with  the  problem  of  evil,  for  "love  means  tri- 
umph  amiH^sufFerjn^^  and  .  .  ,  even  the  divme  love 
itself~must  need  for  its  fulfilment  those  struggles, 
paradoxes,  estrangements,  pursuits,  mistakes,  fail- 
ures, dark  hours,  sins,  hopes,  and  horrors  of  the  world 
of  human  passion  in  which,  according  to  our  poet,  the 
divine  is  incarnate.  Perfect  love  includes  and  means 
the  very  experience  of  suftering,  and  of  powers  that 
oppose  love^  aimlT^  To  this  commentary  of  Pro- 
fessor Royce,  we  may  add  a  few  words  upon  the  same 
subject  taken  from  the  important  work  of  Mr.  Henry 
Jones  upon  "Browning  as  a  Philosophical  and  Re- 
ligious Teacher." 

"The  meeting  point  of  God  and  man  is  love.  Love,  in  other 
words,  is,  for  the  poet,  the  supreme  principle  both  of  morality 
and  religion.  Love,  once  for  all,  solves  that  contradiction 
between  them  which,  both  in  theory  and  in  practice,  has  em- 
barrassed the  world  for  so  many  ages.  Love  is  the  sublimest 
conception  attainable  by  man;  a  life  inspired  by  it  is  the  most 
perfect  form  of  goodness  he  can  conceive;  therefore,  love  is, 
at  the  same  moment,  man's  moral  ideal,  and  the  very  essence  of 
Godhood.  A  life  actuated  by  love  is  divine  whatever  other 
limitations  it  may  have.  Such  is  the  perfection  and  glory  of 
this  emotion,  when  it  has  been  translated  into  a  self-conscious 


202  ROBERT  BROWNING 

motive  and  become  the  energy  of  an  intelligent  will,  that  it 
lifts  him  who  owns  it  to  the  sublimest  height  of  being." 

"For  the  loving  worm  within  its  clod. 
Were  diviner  than  a  loveless  God 
Amid  his  worlds,  I  will  dare  to  say." 

This  view  of  the  comparative  simplicity  and  un- 
reasoned character  of  Browning's  philosophy  leads  us 
necessarily  to  an  examination  of  Browning's  style 
considered  as  the  reflex  of  his  thought.  The  poet 
who  prepared  himself  for  his  vocation,  as  we  are 
told  that  Browning  did,  by  such  a  self-imposed  task 
as  that  of  reading  and  digesting  the  whole  of  John- 
son's Dictionary,  was  certain  to  astonish  his  readers 
by  the  opulence  of  his  vocabulary,  and  by  his  almost 
unexampled  command  over  the  verbal  resources  of 
English  speech.  Had  this  command  been  accom- 
panied by  anything  like  an  equal  command  over  the 
harmonies  of  our  language,  he  would  have  been  a 
poet  indeed.  He  chose  instead,  or  was  constrained 
by  temperament,  to  write  in  a  manner  so  perverse,  so 
grotesque,  so  impatient  of  all  artistic  restraint,  that 
his  warmest  admirers  find  it  difficult  to  say  much 
in  favour  of  a  good  half  of  his  work.  The  fantastic 
invention  which  could  devise  such  a  title  as  "Red 
Cotton  Night-Cap  Country;  or,  Turf  and  Towers" 
extended,  unhappily,  into  the  substance  of  the  poems 
thus  grotesquely  named.  Many  a  reader  has  been 
baffled  by  the  involved,  tortuous,  and  elliptical  style 
of  Browning's  most  characteristic  writings,  and 
turned  away  in  despair  from  the  words  that  have 


ROBERT  BROWNING  203 

confronted  him  in  such  forbidding  cohorts.  Many 
a  reader  has  missed  the  kernel  to  be  found  within 
the  hard  nut  of  "Sordello,"  and  remained  perforce 
content  with  the  opening  line, 

"Who  will,  may  hear  Sordello's  story  told," 

and  the  closing  line, 

"Who  would  has  heard  Sordello's  story  told." 

The  presumably  unconscious  irony  of  these  words  has 
sunk  deep  into  the  souls  of  disconcerted  explorers, 
and  made  them  put  aside  unread  the  poem  wherein 
they  might  have  found  such  glorious  things  as  this 
description  of  Dante,  for  example : 

"Dante,  pacer  of  the  shore 
Where  glutted  hell  disgorgeth  filthiest  gloom, 
Unbitten  by  its  whirring  sulphur-spume — 
Or  whence  the  grieved  and  obscure  waters  slope 
Into  a  darkness  quieted  by  hope; 
Plucker  of  amaranths  grown  beneath  God's  eye 
In  gracious  twilights  where  his  chosen  lie." 

Those  who  are  prepared  to  endure  hardships  by  the 
way  will  find  such  things  as  this  to  reward  them  in 
the  most  unpromising  of  Browning's  poems;  once 
fairly  afloat  upon  the  eddying  stream  of  his  verbiage, 
the  "obscure  waters"  will  often  be  found  to  "slope 
into  a  darkness  quieted  by  hope,"  and  some  imagi- 
native gleam  or  flush  of  tender  beauty  will  com- 
pensate for  the  roughness  of  the  journey.  The 
commonest  charge  against  Browning  is  that  of  ob- 


a04  ROBERT  BROWNING 

scurity,  but  he  does  not  seem  to  me  to  be  quite  deserv- 
ing of  that  ascription.  An  example  may  be  given 
to  illustrate  just  what  I  mean.  The  dramatic  lyric 
entitled  "Popularity"  pictures  a  poet  whose  genius 
the  world  has  not  recognised,  comparing  him  with  a 
fisherman  drawing  up  in  his  net  those  Tyrian  mol- 
lusks  which  yield  the  purple  dye  of  royalty.  The 
public  does  not  recognise  the  royal  colour  until  others 
have  extracted  and  refined  it.  Then  it  becomes  the 
fashion,  it  is  praised  by  everybody,  and  all  sorts 
of  middlemen  exploit  it  to  their  own  profit.  Mean- 
while, the  poet-fisherman,  who  first  brought  it  from 
the  depths,  has  died  of  neglect  and  a  broken  heart. 
Such  is  the  story  which  this  lyric  has  to  tell,  and 
now  let  us  see  how  it  is  told.  The  closing  stanza  will 
suffice  for  the  present  purpose: 

"Hobbs  hints  blue, — straight  he  turtle  eats: 
Nobbs  prints  blue, — claret  crowns  his  cup: 

Nokes  outdares  Stokes  in  azure  feats, — 
Both  gorge.     Who  fished  the  murex  up? 

What  porridge  had  John  Keats?" 

It  is  very  simple,  after  all,  and  quite  intelligible, 
taken  with  the  explanation,  and  the  explanation  was, 
of  course,  superfluous  to  those  readers  who  knew  the 
poem  beforehand.  But  with  what  blank  amazement 
would  one  listen  to  the  stanza,  did  he  not  know  the 
poem,  or  were  its  reading  prefaced  by  no  explanation ! 
Now  this  poem  is  not  obscure.  It  is  difficult,  no  doubt, 
and  not  fitted  for  reading  aloud.  But  the  thought 
of  it,  once  grasped,  is  absolutely  simple  and  clean-cut. 


ROBERT  BROWNING  205 

"Obscurity  is  the  natural  product  of  turbid  forces 
and  confused  ideas,"  says  Swinburne,  "of  a  feeble 
and  clouded  or  of  a  vigorous  but  unfixed  and  chaotic 
intellect."  No  one  has  discussed  this  question  of 
Browning's  alleged  obscurity  with  more  force  and 
insight  than  the  critic  just  mentioned,  and  I  pro- 
pose to  draw  upon  him  at  some  length. 

"If  there  is  any  great  quality  more  perceptible  than  another  in 
Mr.  Browning's  intellect  it  is  his  decisive  and  incisive  faculty 
of  thought,  his  sureness  and  intensity  of  perception,  his  rapid 
and  trenchant  resolution  of  aim.  To  charge  him  with  obscurity 
is  about  as  accurate  as  to  call  Lynceus  purblind  or  complain  of 
the  sluggish  action  of  the  telegraphic  wire.  He  is  something 
too  much  the  reverse  of  obscure;  he  is  too  brilliant  and  subtle 
for  the  ready  reader  of  a  ready  writer  to  follow  with  any 
certainty  the  track  of  an  intelligence  which  moves  with  such 
incessant  rapidity,  or  even  to  realise  with  what  spider-like 
swiftness  and  sagacity  his  building  spirit  leaps  and  lightens 
to  and  fro  and  backward  and  forward  as  it  lives  along  the 
animated  line  of  its  labour,  springs  from  thread  to  thread  and 
darts  from  centre  to  circumference  of  the  glittering  and 
quivering  web  of  living  thought  woven  from  the  inexhaustible 
stores  of  his  perception  and  kindled  from  the  inexhaustible 
fire  of  his  imagination.  .  .  .  We  find  no  obscurity  in  the 
lightning,  whether  it  play  about  the  heights  of  metaphysical 
speculation  or  the  depths  of  character  and  motive;  the  mind 
derives  as  much  of  vigorous  enjoyment  from  the  study  by 
such  light  of  the  one  as  of  the  other.  ...  If  indeed  there  be 
any  likelihood  of  error  in  his  exquisite  analysis,  he  will  doubt- 
less be  found  to  err  rather  through  excess  of  light  than 
through  any  touch  of  darkness;  we  may  doubt  .  .  .  whether 
the  perception  of  good  or  evil  would  actually  be  so  acute  in  the 
mind  of  the  supposed  reasoner;  whether,  for  instance,  a  veri- 
table household  assassin,  a  veritable  saviour  of  society  or  other 
incarnation  of  moral  pestilence,  would  in  effect  see  so  clearly 
and  so  far,  with  whatever  perversion  or  distortion  of  view,  into 


206  ROBERT  BROWNING 

the  recesses  of  hell,  wherein  he  lives  and  moves  and  has  his 
being;  recognising  with  quick  and  delicate  apprehension  what 
points  of  vantage  he  must  strive  to  gain,  what  outposts  of  self- 
defence  he  may  hope  to  guard,  in  the  explanation  and  vindica- 
tion of  the  motive  forces  of  his  nature  and  the  latent  main- 
spring of  his  deeds." 

These  words  afford  the  most  luminous  imaginable 
commentary  upon  Browning's  treatment  of  the  char- 
acter of  Guido  Franceschini  in  "The  Ring  and  the 
Book,"  or  the  character  of  Louis  Napoleon  in  "Prince 
Hohenstiel-Schwangau."  It  is  almost  equally  lumi- 
nous when  applied  to  such  famous  studies  of  char- 
acter as  those  of  Sludge,  Aristophanes,  and  Bishop 
Blougram. 

It  has  become  a  critical  commonplace  to  say  that 
in  Browning  the  dramatic  instinct  was  more  fully 
developed  than  in  any  other  English  poet  since 
the  Elizabethans.  And  this  dramatic  instinct  was 
accompanied  by  a  psychological  insight,  certainly 
not  deeper  than  that  of  Shakespeare,  but  in  some 
respects  even  more  minute  and  subtle,  because  reflect- 
ing the  greater  complexity  of  modern  thought  and 
the  wider  range  of  the  intellectual  life.  "The  inci- 
dents in  the  development  of  a  soul :  little  else  is  worth 
study,"  Browning  said  in  the  preface  to  the  second 
edition  of  "Sordello."  He  made  it  his  chief  artisti^ 
business  to  study  souls  of  all  tyij£a_and-com^exions, 
to  ent^  into  their  inmost  workings,  to  lay  bare  their 
profouhdest  secrets.  "Tie  makes  us  understand,  as  no 
one  IradTnade  us  understand  before  him,  what  it  was 
like  to  be  a  participant  in  the  victory  of  Marathon, 


ROBERT  BROWNING  207 

an  Arabian  scholar  brought  into  fortuitous  contact 
with  the  influence  of  Christ,  a  mediaeval  scholastic, 
a  Bishop  of  the  Renaissance,  a  spokesman  of  the 
charlatanry  of  modern  spirituahsm,  a  casuistical 
defender  of  a  bastard  modern  imperialism.  To  the 
study  of  these  historical  types,  generahsed  or  special- 
ised ag"the  case  might  be,  he  added  a  long  series  of 
studies  of  the  types  of  private  character  shaped  by 
the  conditions  of  our  own  time,  equally  profound  in 
their  psychology^  equally  deep  in  their  sympathy, 
equally  generous  in  their  endeavour  to  permit  each 
to  speak  for  itself,  and  plead  its  own  cause  in  the 
face  of  whatever  violation  of  the  code  of  conventional 
morality  may  have  been  laid  to  its  charge.  One  of 
the  difEcuTr"questions  of  criticism  is  to  know  what 
inferences  may  be  drawn  from  the  writings  of  an 
essentially  dramatic  poet  concerning  his  own  personal 
opinions  and  his  own  relation  toward  the  problems 
which  are  embodied  in  the  dramatic  situations  por- 
trayed by  him.  We  are  all  familiar  with  Browning's 
rejection  of  the  notion  that  the  poet's  heart  was 
unlocked  in  the  sonnets  of  Shakespeare.  "If  so,  the 
less  Shakespeare  he!"  is  Browning's  indignant  an- 
swer to  that  claim.  Nevertheless,  I  believe  that 
neither  Shakespeare  nor  Browning  was  really  so 
impersonal  in  utterance  as  the  strictly  dramatic 
theory  would  have  us  maintain.  Many  writers.  Dr. 
Brandes  and  Professor  Goldwin  Smith  being  among 
the  more  recent,  have  supported  the  thesis,  to  my 
mind  quite  convincingly,  that  the  opinions  of  Shakes- 


208  ROBERT  BROWNING 

peare  upon  all  fundamental  matters  stand  clearly 
revealed  in  his  writings.  And  this  I  believe  to  be  quite 
as  true  of  Browning  as  of  Shakespeare.  But  the 
tests  by  which  we  may  know  when  a  poet  is  speaking 
solely  as  the  mouthpiece  of  one  of  liis  characters, 
and  when  he  is  speaking,  at  least  in  part,  from  the 
depth  of  his  own  convictions,  are  too  delicate  to  re- 
ceive exact  formulation.  Browning  himself,  in  the 
very  poem  which  repudiates  the  notion  of  a  dramatic 
poet's  self-revelation,  tells  us  that  the 

"Outside  should  suffice  for  evidence: 
And  whoso  desires  to  penetrate 
Deeper,  must  dive  by  the  spirit-sense." 

It  is  by  this  spirit-sense,  which  all  lovers  of  poetry 
have  in  some  measure,  that  we  divine  the  poet's  per- 
sonal message,  even  when  placed  upon  the  lips  of 
some  dramatic  creation.  Who  can  doubt,  for  ex- 
ample, that  Browning  proje^s  his  own  personality 
into  ibe  poem  of  "Abt  Vogler,"  when  the  soul  of  the 
musician  pours  itself  out  in  the  following  utterances : 

"Therefore  to  whom  turn  I  but  to  thee,  the  ineffable  Name? 
Builder  and  maker,  thou,  of  houses  not  made  vsith  hands ! 
What,  have  fear  of  change  from  thee  who  art  ever  the  same? 
Doubt  that  thy  power  can  fill  the  heart  that  thy  power 
expands  ? 
There  shall  never  be  one  lost  good!    What  was,  shall  live  as 
before; 
The  evil  is  nuU,  is  naught,  is  silence  implying  sound; 
What  was  good  shall  be  good,  with,  for  evil,  so  much  good 
more; 
On  the  earth  the  broken  arcs;  in  the  heaven,  a  perfect  round. 


rxA'^^^^ 


ROBERT  BROWNING  209 

All  we  have  willed  or  hoped  or  dreamed  of  good  shall  exist; 
Not   its   semblance,   but   itself;   no   beauty,   nor   good,   nor 
power 
Whose  voice  has  gone  forth,  but  each  survives  for  the  melodist 

When  eternity  affirms  the  conception  of  an  hour, 
The  high  that  proved  too  high,  the  heroic  for  earth  too  hard, 

The  passion  that  left  the  ground  to  lose  itself  in  the  sky. 
Are  music  sent  up  to  God  by  the  lover  and  the  bard; 
Enough  that  he  heard  it  once:  we  shall  hear  it  by-and-by." 

Browning  is  one  of  the  poets  of  optimism,  and 
the  passage  just  quoted  is  one  of  the  central  ex- 
pressions of  his  optimistic  philosophy.  Optimism, 
as  I  have  remarked  upon  an  earlier  occasion  in  this 
volume,  is  more  apt  to  be  a  matter  of  temperament 
than  of  rational  conviction.  It  certainly  was  a  mat- 
ter of  temperament  in  the  case  of  Browning.  His 
intellectual  interests  were  so  wide,  and  his  vitality  so 
abounding,  that  it  was  not  within  his  power  to  be- 
come a  poet  of  melancholy  and  despair.  He  faced 
the  problem  of  evil  with  such  resolute  i;<3lirageJthat 
we  can'liardly  say  that  his  eyes  were  of__tliQ&&JLliat. 
"avert  their  ken  from  half  of  human  fate,"  yet  the 
seriously  reflective  mind  can  never  become  wholly 
reconciled  to  a  view  of  life  that  seems  unwilling  to 
allow  to  sin  and  suffering  their  full  share  in  human 
affairs.  We  may  be  moved  by  the  argument  that 
they  are  a  part  of  the  divine  scheme,  and  essential 
to  its  completeness,  but  when  the  glow  caused  by  the 
poet's  eloquence  has  faded  from  our  souls,  there  re- 
mains a  lurking  suspicion  that  his  reasoning  is 
sophistical,  and  that  from  a  universe  in  very  truth 


210  ROBERT  BROWNING 

the  result  of  a  divine  ordinance,  some,  at  least,  of 
the  more  terrible  afflictions  of  mankind  might  have 
been  spared.  "What  can  be  more  idle,"  says  Mr. 
John  Morley, 

^Vhen  one  of  the  world's  bitter  puzzles  is  pressed  on  the  teacher, 
than  that  he  should  betake  himself  to  an  altitude  whence  it  is 
not  visible,  and  then  assure  us  that  it  is  not  only  invisible,  but 
non-existent?  Tliis  is  not  to  see  the  facts  clearly,  but  to  pour 
the  fumes  of  obscuration  round  them.  .  .  .  The  believer  who 
looks  to  another  world  to  redress  the  wrongs  and  horrors  of 
this;  the  sage  who  warns  us  that  the  law  of  life  is  resignation, 
renunciation,  and  doing-without — each  of  these  has  a  foothold  in 
common  language.  But  to  say  that  all  infractions  of  love  and 
equity  are  speedily  punished — punished  by  fear — and  then  to 
talk  of  the  perfect  compensation  of  the  universe  is  mere  play- 
ing with  words,  for  it  does  not  solve  the  problem  in  the  terms 
in  which  men  propound  it." 

Mr.  INIorley  is  writing  about  Emerson  when  he  makes 
these  remarks,  and  they  do  not  strictly  apply  to  a 
poet  who  envisaged  the  problem  of  evil  as  squarely 
as  Browning  did,  but  in  the  presence  of  Browning's 
conclusions,  it  seems  necessary  to  recall  the  fact  that 
the  tragic  view  of  life  is,  after  all,  the  view  that  has 
been  held  by  the  greatest  poets  in  their  deepest  moods, 

"Have  your  found  your  life  distasteful? 

My  life  did,  and  does,  smack  sweet. 
Was  your  youth  of  pleasure  wasteful? 

Mine  I  saved  and  hold  complete. 
Do  your  joys  with  age  diminish? 

When  mine  fail  me  I'll  complain. 
Must  in  death  your  daylight  finish? 

My  sun  sets  to  rise  again. 


ROBERT  BRO^AIXG  211 

I  find  earth  not  grey  but  rosy. 
Heaven  not  grim  but  fair  of  hue. 

Do  I  stoop?     I  pluck  a  posy. 
Do  I  stand  and  stare?    AU's  blue.'' 

This  is  the  clear  expression  of  a  temperament  rather 
than  of  an  intellectual  conviction.  It  may  have 
power  to  reclaim  the  spirit  that  is  hovering  between  a 
lighter  and  a  darker  mood ;  it  will  hardly  seem  other 
than  ironical  to  the  soul  that  is  passing  through  the 
valley  of  the  shadow  of  death. 

We  expect  of  a  poet  that  he  shall  be  responsive  to 
the  raam  intellectual  movements  of  the  age  in  which 
he  livesy  iJiaLiie  shall  react  against  the  tendencies  of 
contemporary  thought,  cither  carrying  them  on  to 
a  further  stage  of  development,  or  resisting  them  if 
they  §eem  to  deviate~fnnirtheiiirc-of  progress.  Now 
the  great  watchword  of  contemporary  thought  for 
every  one  reaching  manhood  about  the  middle  of  the 
nineteenth  century  was  fKe~~w6Vcf\^voru^tTon,  that 
t  ransTormmg  ^6ncept^wKic1r^s~gn'enrTo  our  modem 
view  of  man  and  nature  a  unity  that  it  could  not 
have  in  any  earher  age.  As  I  have  said  elsewhere, 
this  concept  "has  so  entered  into  the  tissue  of  aU 
our  thinking  that  it  is  well-nigh  impossible  for  a 
man  born  during  the  half-century  just  ending  to 
put  himself  into  what  was  the  characteristic  state  of 
the  intelhgent  mind  fifty  or  a  hundred  years  ago. 
Questions  which  were  then  debatable  are  now  closed 
forever;  positions  which  might  then  be  held  in  all 
seriousness   now   seem  the   merest   childishness;   the 


212  ROBERT  BROWNING 

animistic  view  of  nature,  the  cataclysmic  geology, 
the  special-creation  hypothesis,  the  notion  that  or- 
dered government  originated  in  a  social  contract — 
these  things,  and  a  host  of  others  like  unto  them, 
all  of  which  once  swayed  the  minds  of  able  men,  are 
now  swept  into  the  intellectual  rubbish-heap.  The 
disciplined  intelligence  can  no  longer  think  in  those 
terms."  When  we.Jnaiiire  into  Browning's  relation- 
ship toward  the_eyolutionary  philosophy^anH  such 
an  inquiry  provides  us  with  a  perfectly  legitimate 
touchstone  by  which  to  test  the  probable  value  of 
his  teaching — it  is  extremely  interesting  to  find  him 
among  those  precursors  of  the  modem  way  of  think- 
ing  who  were  evolutionists  of  a  sort  before  "The 
Origin  of  Species'^  was  published,  whoTiad  reached 
by  intuitibifsome  notion  of  the  central  truth  of  the 
doctrine  which  Darwin  and  Spencer  were  afterwards 
to  establish  upon  so  solid  a  scientific  basis.  As  early 
as  1835,  in  >I^iracelsu^j,"  Browning  wrote  these 
lines :     •— — — ^— '■'^ 

"The  centre-fire  heaves  underneath  the  earth, 
And  the  earth  changes  like  a  human  face ; 
The  molten  ore  bursts  up  among  the  rocks, 
Winds  into  the  stone's  heart,  outbranches  bright 
In  hidden  mines,  spots  barren  river-beds. 
Crumbles  into  fine  sand  where  sunbeams  bask — 
Grod  joys  therein.    The  wroth  sea's  waves  are  edged 
With  foam,  white  as  the  bitten  lip  of  hate. 
When,  in  the  solitary  waste,  strange  groups 
Of  young  volcanoes  come  up,  Cyclops-like, 
Staring  together  with  their  eyes  on  flame — 
God  tastes  a  pleasure  in  their  uncouth  prid«. 


ROBERT  BROWNING  213 

Then  all  is  still;  earth  is  a  wintry  clod: 

But  spring-wind  like  a  dancing  psaltress  passes 

Over  its  breast  to  waken  it,  rare  verdure 

Buds  tenderly  upon  rough  banks,  between 

The  withered  tree-roots  and  the  cracks  of  frost. 

Like  a  smile  striving  with  a  wrinkled  face; 

The  grass  grows  bright,  the  boughs  are  swoln  with  blooms 

Like  chrysalids  impatient  for  the  air, 

The  shining  dorrs  are  busy,  beetles  run 

Along  the  furrows;  ants  make  their  ado; 

Above,  birds  fly  in  merry  flocks,  the  lark 

Soars  up  and  up,  shivering  for  very  joy; 

Afar  the  ocean  sleeps;  white  fishing-gulls 

Flit  where  the  strand  is  purple  with  its  tribe 

Of  nested  limpets;  savage  creatures  seek 

Their  loves  in  wood  and  plain — and  God  renews 

His  ancient  rapture.    Thus  he  dwells  in  all. 

From  life's  minute  beginnings,  up  at  last 

To  man — the  consummation  of  this  scheme 

Of  being,  the  completion  of  this  sphere 

Of  life:  whose  attributes  had  here  and  there 

Been  scattered  o'er  the  visible  world  before. 

Asking  to  be  combined,  dim  fragments  meant 

To  be  united  in  some  wondrous  whole. 

Imperfect  qualities  throughout  creation, 

Suggesting  some  one  creature  yet  to  make. 

Some  point  where  all  those  scattered  rays  should  meet 

Convergent  in  the  faculties  of  man." 

In  the  creation  of  man,  however,  the  process  of  evo- 
lution takes  upon  itself  a  new  phase. 

"So  far  the  seal 
Is  put  on  life;  one  stage  of  being  complete, 
One  scheme  wound  up." 

With  this  new  epoch  of  creation,  there  begins  the  re- 
actiori  of  man  upon  his  environment,  the  reaction  of 


«14  ROBERT  BROWNING 

inteUigence  upon  the  unintelligent_  forcps  that,  have 
evolved  it^  the  reaction  of  feeling  and  human  sym- 
pathy upon  unsentient  nature.  It  is  all  a  pathetic 
fallacy,  if  you  will,  but  it  is  the  substance  of  the 
poetical  doctrine  of  Wordsworth,  it  is  also  suggestive 
of  the  metaphysics  of  Schopenhauer,  and  it  seems  to 
foreshadow  the  ethical  position  of  Huxley. 

"Man,  once  descried,  imprints  forever 
His  presence  on  all  lifeless  things:  the  winds 
Are  henceforth  voices,  wailing  or  a  shout, 
A  querulous  mutter  or  a  quick  gay  laugh. 
Never  a  senseless  gust  now  man  is  born. 
The  herded  pines  commune  and  have  deep  thoughts, 
A  secret  they  assemble  to  discuss 
When  the  sun  drops  behind  their  trunks  which  glare 
Like  grates  of  hell:  the  peerless  cup  afloat 
Of  the  lake-lily  is  an  urn,  some  nymph 
Swims  bearing  high  above  her  head:  no  bird 
Whistles  unseen,  but  through  the  gaps  above 
That  let  light  in  upon  the  gloomy  woods, 
A  shape  peeps  from  the  breezy  forest-top. 
Arch  with  small  puckered  mouth  and  mocking  eye. 
The  morn  has  enterprise,  deep  quiet  droops 
With  evening,  triumph  takes  the  sunset  hour, 
Voluptuous  transport  ripens  with  the  corn 
Beneath  a  warm  moon  like  a  happy  face: 
— And  this  to  fill  us  with  regard  for  man. 
With  apprehension  of  his  passing  worth. 
Desire  to  work  his  proper  nature  out. 
And  ascertain  his  rank  and  final  place. 
For  these  things  tend  still  upward,  progress  '& 
The  law  of  life,  man  is  not  Man  as  yet." 

In  "The  Making  of  Man,"  one  of  the  very  last  of 
Tennyson's   poems,   we   find   this   same  thought   ex- 


ROBERT  BROWNING  215 

pressed  with  ampler  elaboration  and  richer  beauty. 

Returning  to  Browning  once  more,  we  must  find  room 

for  his  forecast  of  the  future  of  mankind  as  thus 

outlined ; 

"Prognostics  told 
Man's  near  approach;  so  in  man's  self  arise 
August  anticipations,  symbols,  types 
Of  a  dim  splendour  ever  on  before 
In  that  eternal  circle  life  pursues. 
For  men  begin  to  pass  their  nature's  bound, 
And  find  new  hopes  and  cares  which  fast  supplant 
Their  proper  joys  and  griefs;  they  grow  too  great 
For  narrow  creeds  of  right  and  wrong,  which  fade 
Before  the  unmeasured  thirst  for  good :  while  peace 
Rises  within  them  ever  more  and  more." 

Writing  a  full  generation  later,  and  in  the  clearer 
light  of  the  Darwinian  period,  Browning  expresses 
the  idea^of^exQluiicux-itt  moEe-exacttermSj  although, 
it  must  be  admitted^with  less_Qf  poetical  effective- 
ness.  ""The  Imesare  from  the  soliloquy  of  the  modem 
saviour  of  society. 

"  'Will  you  have  why  and  wherefore,  and  the  fact 
Made  plain  as  pikestaff?'  Modern  Science  asks. 
'That  mass  man  sprung  from  was  a  jelly-lump 
Once  on  a  time;  he  kept  an  after  course 
Through  fish  and  insect,  reptile,  bird  and  beast. 
Till  he  attained  to  be  an  ape  at  last 
Or  last  but  one.     And  if  this  doctrine  shock 
In  aught  the  natural  pride'  .  .  .  Friend,  banish  fear. 
The  natural  humility  replies! 
Do  you  suppose,  even  I,  poor  potentate, 
Hohenstiel-Schwangau,  who  once  ruled  the  roast, — 
I  was  born  able  at  all  points  to  ply 


216  ROBERT  BROWNING 

My  tools?  or  did  I  have  to  learn  my  trade. 

Practise  as  exile  ere  perform  as  prince? 

The  world  knows  something  of  my  ups  and  downs: 

But  grant  me  time,  give  me  the  management 

And  manufacture  of  a  model  me. 

Me  fifty-fold,  a  prince  without  a  flaw, — 

Why,  there's  no  social  grade,  the  sordidest, 

My  embryo  potentate  should  blink  and  scape. 

King,  all  the  better  he  was  cobbler  once. 

He  should  know,  sitting  on  the  throne,  how  tastes 

Life  to'  who  sweeps  the  doorway." 

....  "God   takes  time. 
I  like  the  thought  he  should  have  lodged  me  once 
I'  the  hole,  the  cave,  the  hut,  the  tenement, 
The  mansion,  and  the  palace;  made  me  learn 
The  feel  o'  the  first,  before  I  found  myself 
Loftier  i'  the  last,  not  more  emancipate; 
From  first  to  last  of  lodging,  I  was  I, 
And  not  at  all  the  place  that  harboured  me. 
Do  I  refuse  to  follow  farther  yet 
I'  the  backwardness,  repine  if  tree  or  flower, 
Mountain  or  streamlet  were  my  dwelling-place 
Before  I  gained  enlargement,  grew  mollusk? 
As  well  account  that  way  for  many  a  thrill 
Of  kinship,  I  confess  to,  with  the  powers 
Called  Nature:  animate,  inanimate. 
In  parts  or  in  the  whole,  there's  something  there 
Man-like  that  somehow  meets  the  man  in  me." 

There  is  nothing  very  profound  about  all  this,  and 
nothing  to  show  that  the  poet  had  any  exact  un- 
derstanding of  the  process  of  organic  development. 
It  means  merely  that  the  central  truth  of  the  evo- 
lutionary doctrine  was  felt  to  be  in  accord  with 
Browning's  intuition  of  the  close  relationship  of 
man  with  nature,  and  thus  found  in  his  mind  a  re- 


ROBERT  BROWNING  217 

sponsive  echo.  If  we  seek  to  trace  the  workings  of 
that  mind  in  connection  with  other  forms  of  philo- 
sophical construction,  we  shall  arrive  at  similar  re- 
sults. It  was  his  instinct,  rather  than  his  reason, 
that  accepted  a  given  body  of  doctrine,  and  he 
brought  a  new  theory  to  the  test,  not  of  any  process 
of  logical  analysis,  but  of  its  fitness  to  satisfy  the 
needs  of  his  peculiar  temperament.  In  poliiics^^^fsiX^ 
eitamplfi  he  was  a  liberal,  and  tells  us  why  he  was  in 
a  soi^e^  that  shows  us  with  singular  clearness  the 
process— if  we  may  call  it  a  process — ^by  which  he 
reached  his  conclusions  upon  philosophical  subjects 
in  general. 

"Why?  Because  all  I  haply  can  and  do, 
All  that  I  am  now,  all  I  hope  to  be, — 
Whence  comes  it  save  from  fortune  setting  free 

Body  and  soul  the  purpose  to  pursue, 

God  traced  for  both?     If  fetters,  not  a  few. 
Of  prejudice,  convention,  fall  from  me. 
These  shall  I  bid  men — each  in  his  degree 

Also  God-guided — bear,  and  gayly  too? 

But  little  do  or  can  the  best  of  us: 

That  little  is  achieved  through  Liberty. 

Who,  then,  dares  hold,  emancipated  thus, 
His  fellow  shall  continue  bound?    Not  I, 

Who  live,  love,  labour  freely,  nor  discuss 
A  brother's  right  to  freedom.    That  is  why." 

Th§  fact  is^Rrowm•T^g^<=;  whnlp  vjp^  nf  liff^  is  rn]nnred 
by  his  own  robust  individualism  and  takes  little  ac- 
count uf  abslracb  reasoning.  A  man's  own  instincts 
are  a'Sutticient  mandate  for  his  actions;  they  are  to 
be  given  the  freest  exercise,  instead  of  being  sub- 


I 


218  ROBERT  BROWNING 

jected  to  ascetic  restraints.  Those  who  have  failed 
to  catch  this  note  of  the  imperiousness  of  passion,  or 
have  sought  to  refine  away  from  it  all  its  sensuous 
implications,  have  missed  the  essence  of  his  teach- 
ing. For  Tennyson  the  aim  of  life  is  the  victory 
of  soul  over  sense,  but  Browning  will  have  it  other- 
wise. 

"Not  with  my  soul,  Love — bid  no  soul  like  mine 
Lap  thee  around,  nor  leave  the  poor  sense  room! 
Soul — travel-worn,  toil-weary — would  confine 

Along  with  Soul,  Soul's  gains  from  glow  and  gloom. 
Captures  from  soarings  high  and  divings  deep. 
Spoil-laden  Soul,  how  should  such  memories  sleep? 
Take  Sense,  too — let  me  love  entire  and  whole — 
Not  with  my  soul ! 

"Eyes  shall  meet  eyes  and  find  no  eyes  between. 

Lips  feed  on  lips,  no  other  lips  to  fear! 

No  past,  no  future — so  thine  arms  but  screen 

The  present  from  surprise!  not  there,  'tis  here — 
Not  then,  'tis  now — back,  memories  that  intrude! 
Make,  Love,  the  universe  our  solitude. 
And,  over  all  the  rest,  oblivion  roll — 
Sense  quenching  Soul!" 

Professor  Santayana  thus  characterise^  Brnwr|ip^!g 
outlook  upon  life: 

"His  notion  is  simply  that  the  game  of  life,  the  exhilaration  of 
action,  is  inexhaustible.  You  may  set  up  your  tenpins  again 
after  you  have  bowled  them  over,  and  you  may  keep  up  the 
sport  forever.  The  point  is  to  bring  them  down  as  often  as 
:  possible  with  a  master-stroke  and  a  big  bang.  That  will  tend 
I  to  invigorate  in  you  that  self-confidence  which  in  this  system 
passes  for  faith.  ...  In  Browning  .  .  .  the  zest  of  life  be- 
comes a  cosmic  emotion;  we  lump  the  whole  together  and  cry, 
'Hurrah    for   the    Universe!'     A    faith   which   is   thus   a   pure 


ROBERT  BROWNING  219 

matter  of  lustiness  and  inebriation  rises  and  falls,  attracts  or 
repels,  with  the  ebb  and  flow  of  the  mood  from  which  it  springs. 
It  is  invincible  because  unseizable;  it  is  as  safe  from  refuta- 
tion as  it  is  rebellious  to  embodiment.  But  it  cannot  enlighten 
or  correct  the  passions  on  which  it  feeds,  v  Like  a  servile  priest, 
it  flatters  them  in  the  name  of  Heaven.  It  cloaks  irrationality 
in  sanctimony;  and  its  admiration  for  every  bluflf  folly,  being 
thus  justified  by  a  theory,  becomes  a  positive  fanaticism,  eager 
to  defend  any  wayward  impulse.*^ 

This  judgment  is  severe,  and  the  very  selection  of 
Browning  to  illustrate  an  egsay  upon  "The  Poetry 
of  Barbarism"  is  even  more  severe,  but  it  represents 
a  point  of  view  so  deliberately  ignored  by  Brown- 
ing enthusiasts  that  I  make  no  apology  for  bringing 
it  forward  to  restore  the  critical  balance.  Given  over 
almost  completely  to  the  sway  of  impulse,  Brown- 
ing*s  activity  was,  on  the  whole,  shaped  to  fine  issues. 
If  his  view  of  life  was  lacking  in  philosophical  depth, 
his  attitude  toward  life  was  a  thoroughly  brave  one, 
and  wins  our  heartiest  admiration.  The  poem  en- 
titled "Prospice,"  blending  as  it  does  the  note  of 
passion  and  the  note  of  courage,  is  one  of  Brown- 
ing's most  characteristic  utterances ;  and,  better  than 
any  epitaph,  real  or  imaginary,  may  serve  our  pres-' 
ent  purpose  as  we  take  leave  of  a  spirit  at  all  times 
so  intensely  alive  that  we  are  fain  to  ask :  "O  strong 
soul,  by  what  shore  tarriest  thou  now.'^" — to  insist 

that 

"Somewhere,  surely,  afar. 
In  the  sounding  labour-house  vast 
Of  being,  is  practised  that  strength, 
Zealous,  beneficent,  firm !" 


220  ROBERT  BROWNING 

Here  are  the  words  with  which  the  poet  of  life  ex- 
uberant and  abounding  greeted  the  arch  enemy  of 
human  hopes  and  endeavours. 

"Fear  death?  to  feel  the  fog  in  my  throat. 

The  mist  in  my  face, 
When  the  mists  begin,  and  the  blasts  denote 

I  am  nearing  the  place. 
The  power  of  the  night,  the  press  of  the  storm. 

The  post  of  the  foe; 
Where  he  stands,  the  Arch  Fear  in  a  visible  form, 

Yet  the  strong  man  must  go: 
For  the  journey  is  done  and  the  summit  attained. 

And  the  barriers  fall. 
Though  a  battle's  to  fight  ere  the  guerdon  be  gained. 

The  reward  of  it  all. 
I  was  ever  a  fighter,  so — one  fight  more. 

The  best  and  the  last! 
I  V.  ould  hate  that  death  bandaged  my  eyes,  and  forbore. 

And  bade  me  creep  past. 
No !  let  me  taste  the  whole  of  it,  fare  like  my  peers 

The  heroes  of  old. 
Bear  the  brunt,  in  a  minute  pay  glad  life's  arrears 

Of  pain,  darkness,  and  cold. 
For  sudden  the  worst  turns  the  best  to  the  brave. 

The  black  minute's  at  end, 
And  the  element's  rage,  the  fiend-voices  that  rave, 

Shall  dwindle,  shall  blend, 
Shall  change,  shall  become  first  a  peace  out  of  pain. 

Then  a  light,  then  thy  breast, 
O  thou  soul  of  my  soul  I  I  shall  clasp  thee  again, 

And  with  God  be  the  rest!" 


Hlfret)  c;enn^0on 

During  the  thirties  and  forties,  our  literature  was 
greatly  in  need  of  a  new  poet.  Keats,  Shelley,  Byron, 
and  Coleridge  had  all  passed  away.  Wordsworth  had 
become  the  shadow  of  a  great  name,  and  Landor, 
despising  popularity,  had  remained  the  poet  of  an 
aristocracy  of  readers.  We  have  seen  how  Brown- 
ing, who  was  vigorously  productive  during  those  two 
decades,  failed  to  become  widely  known,  and  seemed 
to  invite  a  fate  similar  to  that  which  had  overtaken 
Landor.  With  Tennyson  it  was  different.  His  ap- 
pearance was  fortunately  timed,  and  he  appealed 
in  peculiarly  seductive  strains  to  a  public  that  had 
wearied  of  Byronism,  of  revolutionary  heroics,  and 
of  philosophical  mysticism.  Yet  he  had  himself 
served  a  sort  of  apprenticeship  to  all  of  these  things. 
He  had  been  influenced  by  the  metaphysical  bent  of 
Hallam's  mind;  he  had  even  joined  with  his  friend 
in  that  mysterious  Pyrennean  expedition  made  in  be- 
half of  the  Spanish  insurrection  against  the  absolu- 
tism of  Ferdinand,  and  he  had  but  recently  shaken 
off  the  spell  of  the  poet  who  had  dominated  over  his 
youthful  imagination.  When  he  came  to  manhood, 
there  was  a  new  spirit  of  hopefulness  in  the  air.  The 
period  of  the  long  war  was  long  past ;  the  lethargy  of 

221 


^ 


222  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

the  period  of  reaction  was  giving  way  to  a  renewed 
effort  in  the  direction  of  social  progress.  England 
was  girding  her  loins  for  the  task  of  righting  the 
social  and  political  wrongs  that  had  prevailed  un- 
checked during  the  Napoleonic  years.  Science  was 
making  new  conquests  in  the  domain  of  theory,  and 
finding  new  ways  to  enter  into  the  serWce  of  man. 
There  were  signs,  also,  of  the  new  religious  impulse 
that,  proceeding  from  the  universities,  was  destined 
to  exercise  so  powerful  an  influence  upon  the  coming 
generation,  and  restore  something  of  vitality  to  the 
lifeless  traditional  creeds.  To  interpret  the  finer 
spirit  of  this  new  age,  a  new  poet,  nourished  from  the 
fresh  springs  of  its  inspiration,  was  clearly  needed, 
and  with  the  publication,  in  1830,  of  a  slender  volume 
of  "Poems,  Chiefly  Lyrical,"  there  were  at  least  a 
few  observers  of  enough  critical  discernment  to  rec- 
ognise the  fact  that  the  star  of  such  a  poet  had  risen 
above  the  horizon.  Arthur  Hallam,  writing  of  the 
volume  of  1830,  emphasised  the  distinctive  manner 
of  the  new  poet,  and  singled  out  five  features  for 
special  comment: 

"First,  his  luxuriance  of  imagination,  and^  at  the  same  time  his 
control  over  it.  Secondly,  his  power  of  embodying  himself  in 
ideal  characters,  or  rather  moods  of  character,  with  such  ac- 
curacy of  adjustment  that  the  circumstances  of  the  narrative 
seem  to  have  a  natural  correspondence  with  the  predominant 
feeling  and,  as  it  were,  to  be  evolved  from  it  by  assimilative 
force.  Thirdly,  his  vivid,  picturesque  delineation  of  objects, 
and  the  peculiar  skill  with  which  he  holds  all  of  them  fused, 
V  to  borrow  a  metaphor  from  science,  in  a  medium  of  strong 


\ 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  223 

,f emotion.  Fourthly,  the  variety  of  his  lyrical  measures  and  the 
./  exquisite  modulation  of  harmonious  words  and  cadences  to  the 
/  swell  and  fall  of  the  feelings  expressed.  Fifthly,  the  elevated 
habits  of  thought,  implied  in  these  compositions,  and  importing 
a  mellow  soberness  of  tone,  more  impressive  to  our  minds  than 
if  the  author  had  drawn  up  a  set  of  opinions  in  verse,  and 
sought  to  instruct  the  understanding  rather  than  to  communi- 
cate the  love  of  beauty  to  the  heart." 

\  . 

This  passage  is  a  striking  illustration  of  what  criti- 
cism can  do  when  inspired  by  genuine  sympathy. 
With  the  whole  of  Tennyson's  work  before  us,  in- 
stead of  that  single  slender  volume  which  was  in 
Hallam's  hands,  we  should  be  compelled  to  make 
much  the  same  analysis,  enlarging,  perhaps,  upon  the 
greater  refinement  of  experience  and  the  greater  ele- 
vation of  thought  achieved  at  a  later  period.  There 
would  be  nothing  essential  to  add,  unless  it  were 
a  tribute  to  the  weight,  solidity,  and  ripeness  of  the 
thought  which  made  the  Tennyson  of  our  own  recent 
times  so  much  more  than  a  dexterous  craftsman  in 
vocables  and  rhythms,  so  sage  a  counsellor  and  so 
trustworthy  a  spiritual  guide  in  our  social  and  reli- 
gious perplexities. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  in  this  volume  of  1830  the 
artistic  element  was  the  predominant  one.  It  re- 
quired an  attentive  listener  to  discern  the  philosophi- 
cal undercurrent  of  these  delicate  and  fanciful 
measures — these  songs  to  Claribel  and  Margaret  and 
Adeline.  One  day  at  rehearsal,  a  famous  orchestral 
conductor  laid  down  his  baton,  and  remarked:  "Gen- 
tlemen,  that  passage  should   sound  like  a  bluebell 


224  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

touched  by  a  fairy."  To  the  readers  of  Tennyson's 
early  lyrics  some  such  thought  as  this  must  fre- 
quently have  come.  A  bluebell  touched  by  a  fairy  is 
an  admirable  metaphor  for  the  characterisation  of 
these  exquisite  metrical  arrangements.  But  readers 
in  search  of  something  more  than  melodious  grace 
could  find  in  the  "Poems,  Chiefly  Lyrical"  an  occa- 
sional deep  note.  They  could  find,  for  example,  that 
declaration  of  the  poet's  mission,  who 

"Saw  thro'  life  and  death,  thro'  good  and  ill. 
He  saw  thro'  his  own  soul, 
The  marvel  of  the  everlasting  will, 
An  open  scroll." 

They  could  read  how  "Freedom  reared  her  beautiful 
bold  brow"  in  the  "august  sunrise"  of  that  genius, 

and  how 

"In  her  raiment's  hem  was  traced  in  flame 
Wisdom,  a  name  to  shake 
All  evil  dreams  of  power — a  sacred  name." 

They  could  find  something  of  the  political  passion 
of  Shelley  and  Wordsworth  in  the  sonnets  to  "Bona- 
parte" and  "Poland."  And  in  the  rambling  verses 
entitled  "Supposed  Confessions  of  a  Second-Rate 
Sensitive  Mind"  they  could  find  more  than  a  hint 
of  that  preoccupation  with  the  problems  of  religious 
philosophy  which  was  to  become  more  and  more  pro- 
nounced with  the  development  of  Tennyson's  powers. 
There  is  nothing  uncommon  in  the  condition  of  mind 
revealed  in  this  poem.     It  reflects  the  questionings 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  225 

and  perplexities  that  beset  every  serious  soul  that 
has  outgrown  the  period  of  childish  acceptance  of 
its   religious   teachings.      "Why   not  believe   then?" 

asks  the  young  poet. 

"Why  not  yet 
Anchor  thy  frailty  there,  where  man 
Hath  moor'd  and  rested  ?    Ask  the  sea 
At  midnight,  when  the  crisp  slope  waves 
After  a  tempest,  rib  and  fret 
The  brood-imbased  beach,  why  he 
Slumbers  not  like  a  mountain  tarn? 
Wherefore  his  ripples  are  not  curls 
And  ripples  of  an  inland  mere? 
Wherefore  he  moaneth  thus,  nor  can 
Draw  down  into  his  vex^d  pools 
All  that  blue  heaven  which  hues  and  paves 
The  other?" 

To  ask  these  questions  is  to  answer  them,  or  rather 
to  indicate  how  impossible  it  is  that  they  should  be 
answered  in  the  sense  that  youth  might  wish.  It  is 
only  after  a  sharp  spiritual  struggle  that  the  soul 
rises  to  a  plane  where  such  questionings  no  longer 
have  power  to  rend  it.  /  Such  calm  and  self-possession, 
as  Arnold  says, 

"Is  all  perhaps  which  man  acquires, 
But  'tis  not  what  our  youth  desires." 

There  is,  at  least,  a  faint  foreshadowing  of  the  faith 
of  "In  Memoriam"  in  the  conjecture  that 

"From  doubt  at  length 
Truth  may  stand  forth  unmoved  of  change. 
An  image  with  profulgent  brows 
'  And  perfect  limbs." 


226  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

The  study  of  Tennyson  offers  no  problem  more 
interesting  than  that  of  tracing  the  development 
of  the  thought  thus  presented  in  embryo  in  this  early 
poem.  Is  there  a  moral  order  at  the  heart  of  this 
universe  which  seems  so  unmoral?  Is  there  a  divine 
guidance  in  the  affairs  of  men?  Are  we  merely 
cheated  by  all  those  passionate  aspirations  which  we 
associate  with  religious  belief,  or  are  they  themselves 
the  warrant  of  their  own  validity?  For  sixty  years 
Tennyson  wrestled  with  these  questions,  viewing  them 
in  the  light  of  every  new  development  of  scientific 
or  pliilosophical  thought,  bringing  to  their  consid- 
eration an  open  mind  and  an  intellect  of  which  the 
present  century  will  understand  the  power  better  than 
the  last  century  understood  it.  For  himself,  at  least, 
victory  was  the  crown  of  his  struggle, — victory  for 
the  fundamental  ideas  that  he  sought  to  vindicate, 
victory  attested  by  the  very  scars  of  the  spiritual 
conflict.  We  have  in  this  history  of  the  poet's 
inmost  life,  first  the  early  phase  of  doubt  and  inde- 
cision, then  the  experience  of  sorrow  that  led  to  the 
chastened  faith  of  "In  Memoriam,"  and,  last  of  all, 
the  long  period  of  broadening  vista  and  ripening 
thought  that  found  expression  in  these  poems  of  his 
later  years  that  we  are  only  just  beginning  to  under- 
stand and  to  appraise  at  their  true  value.  This 
steady  development  of  Tennyson's  intellectual  power, 
this  continuous  growth  whereby  the  poet  became 
gradually  merged  into  the  prophet,  although  by  a 
process  so  insensible  that  many  did  not  realise  it  until 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  227 

his  death  directed  their  thought  into  retrospective 
channels,  has  been  admirably  expressed  by  Frederic 
Myers : 

"For  indeed,  both  in  aspect  and  in  mood  of  mind,  there  has 
arisen  between  the  poet  of  the  'Dream  of  Fair  Women'  and  the 
poet  of  'Vastness'  a  change  like  the  change  between  the  poet  of 
•Comus'  and  the  poet  of  'Samson  Agonistes.'  In  each  case  the 
potent  nature,  which  in  youth  felt  keenlier  than  any  contem- 
porary the  world's  beauty  and  charm,  has  come  with  age  to 
feel  with  like  keenness  its  awful  majesty,  the  clash  of  unknown 
energies,  and  'the  doubtful  doom  of  humankind.'  And  the 
persistence  of  Lord  Tennyson's  poetic  gift  in  all  its  glory — a 
persistence  scarcely  rivalled  since  Sophocles — has  afforded  a 
channel  for  the  emergence  of  forces  which  must  always  have 
lain  deep  in  his  nature,  but  which  were  hidden  from  us  by  the 
very  luxuriance  of  the  fancy  and  the  emotion  of  youth." 

Carlyle's  characterisation  of  Tennyson  as  a  young 
man  has  often  been  quoted.  "Alfred,"  he  wrote,  "is 
one  of  the  few  British  and  foreign  figures  (a  not 
increasing  number,  I  think)  who  are  and  remain 
beautiful  to  me,  a  true  human  soul,  or  some  authentic 
approximation  thereto,  to  whom  your  own  soul  can 
say,  'Brother!'  ...  A  man  solitary  and  sad,  as 
certain  men  are  dwelling  in  an  element  of  gloom, 
carrying  a  bit  of  Chaos  about  him,  in  short,  which 
he  is  manufacturing  into  Cosmos."  The  process  of 
manufacturing  cosmos  out  of  chaos  was  a  slow  one, 
but  every  new  volume  published  by  Tennyson  showed 
that  something  of  the  sort  was  going  on.  In  "The 
Palace  of  Art,"  which  appeared  in  the  volume  of 
1832-33,  he  is  perplexed  by  "the  riddle  of  the  pain- 


228  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

ful  earth,"  and  feels  that  art  alone  is  not  adequate 
for  its  solution.  The  ethical  burden  of  this  poem  has 
sometimes  been  taken  as  a  protest  against  the  ideal 
of  Goethe,  but  it  is  rather  a  protest  against  a  mis- 
conception of  that  ideal.  When  Matthew  Arnold 
reports  the  message  of  Goethe  in  the  familiar  line, 

"Art  still  has  truth— take  refuge  there," 

he  does  the  great  poet  much  less  than  justice.  Goethe 
presented  the  claims  of  art  in  forceful  terms,  but 
did  not  make  it  the  final  aim  of  human  aspiration. 
Goethe's  essential  ideal  is  that  presented  in  the  clos- 
ing scenes  of  "Faust,"  the  ideal  of  practical  help- 
fulness and  disinterested  effort  for  the  betterment  of 
man's  estate.  "The  Two  Voices"  is  the  most  sig- 
nificant, for  our  present  purpose,  of  these  early 
poems  of  Tennyson.  Although  not  published  until 
1842,  it  was  written  nearly  ten  years  earlier.  Here 
is  presented  in  intensely  subjective  form  the  con- 
flict between  doubt  and  belief,  between  the  mood  of 
despair  and  the  mood  of  faith.  Tennyson  was  ever 
haunted  by  these  two  voices,  although  in  his  later 
years  he  came  to  listen  with  growing  confidence  to 
the  one  that  seemed  to  him  to  embody  the  divine 
message.  In  the  poem  now  under  consideration,  after 
a  long  argument,  the  baffled  spirit  takes  refuge  in 
a  sort  of  Wordsworthian  mysticism. 

"'Moreover,  something  is  or  seems, 
That  touches  me  with  mystic  glearos, 
Like  glimpses  of  forgotten  dreams — 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  229 

"*0f  something  felt,  like  something  here; 
Of  something  done,  I  know  not  where; 
Such  as  no  language  may  declare.' 

"The  still  voice  laugh'd.    *I  talk,'  said  he, 
'Not  with  thy  dreams.    Suffice  it  thee 
Thy  pain  is  a  reality.' 

"  'But  thou,'  said  I,  'hast  missed  thy  mark, 
Who  sought'st  to  wreck  my  mortal  ark. 
By  making  all  the  horizon  dark. 

"  'Why  not  set  forth,  if  I  should  do 
This  rashness,  that  which  might  ensue 
With  this  old  soul  in  organs  new? 

"'Whatever  crazy  sorrow  saith,  ' 

No  life  that  breathes  with  human  breath 
Has  ever  truly  longed  for  death. 

" '  'Tis  life,  whereof  our  nerves  are  scant. 
Oh  life,  not  death,  for  which  we  pant; 
More  life,  and  fuller,  that  I  want.' " 

When  this  fervent  prayer  for  increased  fubiess  of 
life  went  up  from  the  lips  of  the  young  poet,  the 
venerable  poet  of  Weimar  was  breathing  his  last, 
and  upon  his  lips  the  prayer  took  the  form,  not  of 
"more  life,"  but  of  "more  light."  Life  and  light 
are,  perhaps,  the  same  thing  under  different  aspects, 
and  with  Tennyson  also,  the  imperious  demand  of 
impetuous  youth  gave  way,  in  course  of  time,  to  the 
humbler  appeal  of  contemplative  age.  More  than 
fifty  years  later,  the  prayer  of  the  poet  was  to  be- 
come thus  transformed: 


230  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

"My  Father,  and  my  Brother,  and  my  God! 
Heal  me  with  patience!  soften  me  with  grief! 
Let  blow  the  trumpet  strongly  while  I  pray, 
Till  this  embattled  wall  of  unbelief 
My  prison,  not  my  fortress,  fall  away! 
Then,  if  Thou  wiliest,  let  my  day  be  brief, 
So  Thou  wilt  strike  Thy  glory  thro'  the  day." 

Tennyson's  elaboration  of  cosmos  out  of  chaos, 
to  use  Carlyle's  figure  once  again,  went  steadily  on 
for  sixty  years.  V  How  constant  was  his  preoccupa- 
tion with  matters  of  spiritual  import  is  made  suffi- 
ciently evident  by  his  poems  alone,'  and  we  hardly 
need  to  supplement  them  by  external  evidence.  It 
will  do  no  harm,  however,  to  mention  a  few  per- 
tinent facts.  At  the  university,  he  belonged  to  a 
coterie  of  young  men  who  found  their  favourite 
reading  in  metaphysics.  "Soon  after  marriage," 
his  son  and  biographer  tells  us,  "he  took  to  reading 
different  systems  of  philosophy."  Still  later,  he  was 
a  member  of  that  famous  Metaphysical  Society  in 
which  the  foremost  thinkers  of  the  time,  representing 
all  shades  of  opinion,  met  upon  a  common  ground 
of  mutual  tolerance  for  the  discussion  of  funda- 
mental scientific  and  philosophical  principles.  Of 
the  long  series  of  his  poems  which  are  concerned 
chiefly  with  the  play  of  his  intellect  and  emotions 
about  the  essential  ideas  of  religion,  "In  Memoriam" 
seems  to  me  altogether  the  most  precious,  seems  to 
me  the  poem  which  we  should  miss  more  than  any 
other  were  some  inconceivable  mishap  to  deprive  us 
of  the  entire  work  of  Tennyson.     How  deeply  that 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  231 

poem  has  sunk  into  the  consciousness  of  our  race 
there  is  no  need  of  setting  forth.  For  those  who 
have  hstened  to  its  message,  and  especially  for  those 
who  have  felt  its  consoling  influence,  it  seems  to  have 
entered  into  the  very  fibre  of  the  mind,  to  have  been 
a  possession  from  the  very  beginnings  of  the  intro- 
spective life.  Tennyson  spoke  for  himself  as  well  as 
for  his  lost  friend,  for  countless  thousands  of  his 
readers  as  well  as  for  himself,  when  he  wrote : 

*'One  indeed  I  knew 
In  many  a  subtle  question  versed, 
Who  touched  a  jarring  lyre  at  first, 
But  ever  strove  to  make  it  true. 


"Perplext  in  faith,  but  pure  in  deeds, 

At  last  he  beat  his  music  out. 
^"There  lives  more  faith  in  honest  doubt. 
Believe  me,  than  in  half  the  creeds.  ^ 


"He  fought  his  doubts  and  gather'd  strength 
He  would  not  make  his  judgment  blind. 
He  faced  the  spectres  of  the  mind 
And  laid  them:  thus  he  came  at  length 

"To  find  a  stronger  faith  his  own; 

And  Power  was  with  him  in  the  night. 
Which  makes  the  darkness  and  the  light. 
And  dwells  not  in  the  light  alone, 

"But  in  the  darkness  and  the  cloud. 
As  over  Sinai's  peaks  of  old. 
While  Israel  made  their  gods  of  gold, 
Altho'  the  trumpet  blew  so  loud." 


232  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

And  there  is  at  least  an  adumbration  of  his  serene 
later  vision  in  the  lines  which  so  exquisitely  express 
the  essential  meaning  of  prayer : 

"O  living  will  that  shalt  endure 

When  all  that  seems  shall  suffer  shock. 
Rise  in  the  spiritual  rock, 
Flow  thro'  our  deeds  and  make  them  pur^ 

"That  we  may  lift  from  out  of  dust 
A  voice  as  unto  Him  that  hears, 
A  cry  above  the  conquer'd  years 
To  one  that  with  us  works,  and  trust 


*With  faith  that  comes  of  self-control 
The  truths  that  never  can  be  proved 
Until  we  close  with  all  we  loved. 


I  And  all  we  flow  from,  soul  in  soul.'* 

How  Tennyson  faced  the  spectres  of  his  own  mind, 
and  found  his  own  that  stronger  faith  of  which  he 
had  written  in  "In  Memoriam,"  is  best  seen  in  certain 
of  those  poems  of  his  closing  years  that  have  found 
scant  favour  with  some  critics,  but  that  seem  to  me 
to  belong  to  the  very  noblest  expressions  of  his 
genius.  Before  turning  our  attention  to  those  poems, 
let  us  pause  for  a  moment  to  consider  the  stanzas, 
entitled  "The  Higher  Pantheism,"  which  Tennyson 
read  at  the  opening  meeting  of  that  Metaphysical 
Society  already  mentioned. 

"The  sun,  the  moon,  the  stars,  the  seas,  the  hills  and  the  plains — 
Are  not  these,  O  Soul,  the  Vision  of  Him  who  reigns? 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  233 

"Is  not  the  Vision  He?  tho'  He  be  not  that  which  He  seems? 
Dreams  are  true  while  they  last,  and  do  we  not  live  in  dreams  ? 

"Speak  to  Him  thou  for  He  hears,  and  Spirit  with  Spirit  can 

meet — 
Closer  is  He  than  breathing,  and  nearer  than  hands  and  feet. 

"And  the  ear  of  man  cannot  hear,  and  the  eye  of  man  cannot 
see; 
But  if  we  could  see  and  hear,  this  Vision — were  it  not  He?" 

It  is  easy  to  dismiss  this  as  mysticism ;  it  is  easy,  even, 
to  parody  it,  as  Swinburne  did, 

"For  fiddle,  they  say,  is  diddle,  and  diddle,  we  know,  is  dee," 

but  we  cannot  miss  its  impressiveness,  or  escape  the 
feehng  that  we  are  in  the  presence  of  a  poet  who  is 
also  a  seer.  Frederic  Myers  makes  an  apt  quota- 
tion from  Plotinus  in  illustration  of  this  poem : 

"But  to  see  and  to  have  seen  that  Vision  is  reason  no  longer, 
but  more  than  reason,  and  after  reason;  as  also  is  that  Vision 
which  is  seen.  And  perchance  we  should  not  speak  of  sight. 
For  that  which  is  seen — if  we  must  needs  speak  of  the  Seer 
and  the  Seen  as  twain  and  not  as  one — that  which  is  seen  is 
not  discerned  by  the  seer  nor  conceived  of  by  him  as  a  second 
thing;  but,  becoming  as  it  were  other  than  himself,  he  of  him- 
self contributeth  nought,  but  as  when  one  layeth  centre  upon 
centre  he  becometh  God's  and  one  with  God.  Wherefore  this 
vision  is  hard  to  tell  of.  For  how  can  a  man  tell  of  that  as 
other  than  himself,  which  when  he  discerned  it  seemed  not 
other,  but  one  with  himself  indeed? 

Among  the  later  poems  which  embody  Tennyson's 
ripest  prophetic  utterance,  which  relate  the  vision 
whereof,  in  the  words  of  the  Alexandrian  ecstatic, 


234  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

it  is  hard  to  tell,  "The  Ancient  Sage"  is  one  of  the 
most  significant.    Here  we  find  the  injunction  to 

"Cleave  ever  to  the  sunnier  side  of  doubt. 
And  cling  to  Faith  beyond  the  forms  of  faith." 

Here,  also,  we  find  the  intimate  confession  of  a  per- 
sonal experience  of  which  Tennyson  made  much  in 
intercourse  with  his  friends,  an  experience  of  a 
trance-like  condition  into  which  he  sometimes  fell, 
and  which  may  be  interpreted  either  as  a  higher  or 
as  a  lower  condition  than  that  of  normal  waking 
life. 

I  "More  than  once  when  I 

r^^     Sat  all  alone,  revolving  in  myself 

The  word  that  is  the  symbol  of  myself. 

The  mortal  limit  of  the  Self  was  loosed. 

And  passed  into  the  Nameless,  as  a  cloud 

Melts  into  Heaven.     I  touch'd  my  limbs,  the  limbs 

Were  strange  not  mine — and  yet  no  shade  of  doubt. 

But  utter  clearness,  and  thro'  loss  of  self 

""he  gain  of  such  large  life  as  match'd  with  ours 

Were  Sun  to  spark — unshadowable  in  words. 

Themselves  but  shadows  of  a  shadow-world." 

■•  -^-. 

And  in  the  same  poem  we  find  also  this  suggested 
solution  of  the  dark  problem  of  evil  and  suffering — 
a  solution  which  no  longer  seems,  as  that  of  "In 
Memoriam,"(to  hold  doubt  and  hope  in  nearly  equal 
iDalance,  but  rather  to  triumph  over  doubt  as  in  some 
hour  of  rapt  transcendental  vision. 

"The  world  is  dark  with  griefs  and  graves. 
So  dark  that  men  cry  out  against  the  Heavens. 
Who  knows  but  that  the  darkness  is  in  man? 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  235 

The  doors  of  Night  may  be  the  gates  of  Light; 
For  wert  thou  born  or  blind  or  deaf,  and  then 
Suddenly  healed,  how  would'st  thou  glory  in  all 
The  splendours  and  the  voices  of  the  world ! 
And  we,  the  poor  earth's  dying  race,  and  yet 
No  phantoms,  watching  from  a  phantom  shore 
Await  the  last  and  largest  sense  to  make 
The  phantom  walls  of  this  illusion  fade. 
And  show  us  that  the  world  is  wholly  fair." 

"If,  indeed,  the  Cosmos  make  for  good,"  says  Fred- 
eric Myers,  "and  evolution  be  a  moral  as  well  as  a 
material  law, 

"Men  may  come  to  think  of  these  later  Tennysonian  utterances 
as  they  thought  of  the  Messianic  Eclogue  of  Virgil,  as  the 
foreshadowing  of  a  new  dawn  of  human  hope.  They  may  look 
back  to  Tennyson  as  no  belated  dreamer,  but  as  a  leader  who 
in  the  darkest  hour  of  the  world's  thought  would  not  despair 
of  the  destiny  of  man.  They  will  look  back  on  him  as  Romans 
looked  back  on  thatims.haken  Roman  who  purchased  at  its  full 
price  the  field  of  Canna^  on  which  at  that  hour  victorious  Han- 
nibal lay  encamped  with  his  Carthaginian  host." 

It  is  evident  enough  that  Tennyson's  religious 
philosophy  lost  well-nigh  all  of  its  earlier  trappings 
of  dogma  as  his  mind  probed  deeper  and  deeper  into 
the  mysteries  of  life.  His  theology  ceased  to  be  sys- 
tematic in  the  narrow  sense,  and  tended  to  become 
more  and  more  embodied  in  a  few  simple  and  sublime 
ideas.  His  conception  of  God  was  akin  to  that  of 
Spinoza  and  of  Goethe;  his  approach  to  that  con- 
ception was  by  the  Kantian  path  of  the  practical 
reason,  or,  to  employ  the  latest  of  philosophical 
catchwords,    the    path    of    pragmatism.      The    im- 


ALFRED  TENNYSON 

portance  which  he  gave  to  the  notion  of  immortality 
is,  perhaps,  the  most  striking  characteristic  of  his 
rehgious  thought.  There  is  a  passionate  note,  almost 
a  vehemence,  in  his  assertion  of  this  belief  that  we 
do  not  find  elsewhere  in  his  work.  It  meets  us  early 
and  late  in  the  poems.  The  central  quotation  from 
"The  Two  Voices"  has  already  been  given.  "In 
Memoriam"  yields  these  verses,  among  others : 

"My  own  dim  life  should  teach  me  this. 
That  life  shall  live  for  evermore. 
Else  earth  is  darkness  at  the  core. 
And  dust  and  ashes  all  that  is." 


"Thou  wilt  not  leave  us  in  the  dust: 

Thou  madest  man,  he  knows  not  why, 
He  thinks  he  was  not  made  to  die; 
And  thou  hast  made  him:  thou  art  just." 

The  behef  in  a  conscious  personal  immortality  finds 
no  more  touching  expression  than  in  the  Epilogue  to 
"Teiresias,"  addressed  to  the  memory  of  Fitz  Gerald : 

"Gone  into  darkness,  that  full  light 

Of  friendship !  past,  in  sleep,  away 
By  night,  into  the  deeper  night! 

The  deeper  night?  a  clearer  day 
Than  our  poor  twilight  dawn  on  earth — 

If  night,  what  barren  toil  to  be! 
What  life,  so  maim'd  by  night,  were  worth 

Our  living  out?     Not  mine  to  me 
Remembering  all  the  golden  hours 

Now  silent,  and  so  many  dead. 
And  him  the  last." 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  237 

In  "Locksley  Hall  Sixty  Years  After"  there  is  a 
group  of  moving  couplets  upon  the  same  subject. 

"Truth,  for  Truth  is  Truth,  he  worship't,  being  true  as  he  was 
brave ; 
Good,  for  Good  is  Good,  he  follow'd,  yet  he  look'd  beyond  the 
grave, 

"Wiser  there  than  you,  that  crowning  barren  Death  as  lord  of 

all, 
Deem  this  over-tragic  drama's  closing  curtain  is  the  pall ! 

"Beautiful  was  death  in  him,  who  saw  the  death,  but  kept  the 
deck. 
Saving  women  and  their  babes,  and  sinking  with  the  sinking 
wreck. 

"Gone  for  ever!    Ever?  no — for  since  our  dying  race  began. 
Ever,  ever,  and  for  ever  was  the  leading  light  of  man." 

Finally,  in  the  poem  called  "Vastness,"  to  select  one 
further  instance  of  the  poet's  passionate  faith  in 
immortality,  the  appeal  to  the  feelings  is  put  upon 
the  strongest  possible  basis. 

"Many  a  hearth  upon  our  dark  globe  sighs  after  many  a  vanish'd 
face. 
Many  a  planet  by  many  a  sun  may  roll  with  the  dust  of  a 
vanish'd  race. 


'Raving  politics,  never  at  rest— as  this  poor  earth's  pale  history 

runs, — 
What  is  it  all  but  a  trouble  of  ants  in  the  gleam  of  a  million 

million  of  suns? 


238  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

"What  is  it  all,  if  we  aU  of  us  end  but  in  being  our  own  corpse- 
coffins  at  last, 
Swallowed  in  Vastness,  lost  in  silence,  drown'd  in  the  deeps  of 

a  meaningless  Past? 

"What  but  a  murmur  of  gnats  in  the  gloom,  or  a  moment's 
anger  of  bees  in  their  hive?" 

And  then  comes  that  closing  personal  touch  which 
is  better  than  any  reasoned  argument — 

"Peace,  let  it  be!  for  I  loved  him,  and  love  him  for  ever:  the 
dead  are  not  dead  but  alive." 

It  may  be  said  that  in  this  matter  Tennyson  "pro- 
tests too  much"  to  gain  the  completest  confidence, 
and  that  his  appeal  is  to  the  logic  of  the  emotions 
rather  than  to  the  logic  of  the  intellect.  Granting 
all  this,  it  nevertheless  remains  true  that  his  poetry 
has  proved  one  of  the  most  potent  influences  that  the 
last  half-century  has  developed  for  the  strengthen- 
ing of  belief  in  the  essentials  of  religion^  Before 
leaving  this  phase  of  my  subject,  I  wish  to  reproduce 
the  weighty  opinion  of  his  famous  contemporary.  Dr. 
Martineau,  who  wrote  to  the  present  Lord  Tenny- 
son as  follows: 

"That  in  a  certain  sense  our  great  Laureate's  poetry  has  never- 
theless had  a  dissolving  influence  upon  the  over-definite  dogmatic 
creeds  within  hearing  or  upon  the  modes  of  religious  thought 
amid  which  it  was  born,  can  hardly  be  doubted.  In  laying  bare, 
as  it  does,  the  history  of  his  own  spirit,  its  conflicts  and  aspira- 
tions, its  alternate  eclipse  of  doubt  and  glow  of  faith,  it  has 
reported  more  than  a  personal  experience :  he  has  told  the  story 
of   an   age  which   he   has   thus   brought   into   self-knowledge. 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  239 

And  as  he  has  never  for  himself  surrendered  the  traditional 
form  of  a  devout  faith,  till  he  has  seized  its  permanent  spirit, 
and  invested  it  with  a  purer  glory,  so  has  he  saved  it  for  others 
by  making  it  fairer  than  they  had  dreamt.  Among  thousands 
of  readers  previously  irresponsive  to  anything  Divine  he  has 
created,  or  immeasurably  intensified,  the  susceptibility  of 
religious  reverence." 

Large  as  is  the  part  of  religious  philosophy  in 
Tennyson's  thought,  it  must  not  be  forgotten  that 
his  outlook  upon  the  world  in  which  he  lived  included 
many  other  matters  within  its  purview.  He  was 
no  less  awake  to  whatever  concerned  the  permanent 
interests  of  his  fellow-men  in  society  and  politics, 
(in  art  and  science,  than  he  was  to  those  matters 
of  deeper  concern  that  have  hitherto  engaged  our 
attention.  The  following  words  by  Professor  Paul 
Shorey  characterise  with  exactitude  and  admirable 
fitness  both  the  range  of  Tennyson's  intellectual  ex- 
plorations and  the  perfection  of  the  art  with  which 
he  invested  his  thought. 

"The  large  ideas  of  scientific  and  industrial  progress  that  have 
widened  the  thoughts  of  men  in  this  century;  the  partial  failure 
of  these  ideals  during  the  last  three  decades  to  satisfy  our 
legitimate  social  aspirations;  winds  of  doctrine  and  gusts  of 
feeling  that  shake  our  souls  in  the  wreck  of  ancient  faiths; 
the  finer  modern  feeling  for  the  subtler  aspects  of  the  beautiful 
in  nature;  the  more  penetrating  scholarship  and  the  sympa- 
thetic historic  insight  that  have  enabled  us  to  enter  into  full 
possession  of  our  rich  heritage  as  heirs  of  all  the  literatures 
and  all  the  arts  of  the  centuries  behind  us, — these  are  the 
dominant  thoughts  of  the  cultivated  modern  man.  In  the 
varied  and  vigorous  expression  of  each  and  every  one  of  these 
ideas,  Tennyson,  by  citation  of  chapter  and  verse,  can  easily 


240  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

be  proved  supreme.  But,  true  to  his  poet's  mission  as  prophet 
of  the  beautiful,  he  has  never  permitted  himself  to  be  hurried 
into  impatient,  grotesque,  or  intemperate  expression  of  them. 
He  gives  us  more  meaning  to  the  line  than  any  other  English 
poet  except  Shakespeare;  but  he  himself  said  that  he  would 
almost  rather  sacrifice  a  meaning  than  allow  two  s's  to  come  to- 
gether. This  is  his  condemnation  in  the  eyes  of  those  students 
of  literature  who  in  their  inmost  souls  care  nothing  for  dis- 
tinctive poetic  beauty — who  have  never  apprehended  the  full 
ethical  and  aesthetic  significance  of  Keats's  saying  that  beauty 
is  truth,  truth  beauty,  and  who  are  not  aware  that  only  by  self- 
abnegating  consecration  to  the  beautiful  can  the  poet  attain  to 
the  Platonic  unity  of  the  good,  the  beautiful,  and  the  true." 

We  may  take  Tennyson's  attitude  toward  the  rational 
view  of  nature  and  man,  made  possible  by  the  doc- 
trine of  evolution,  as  an  illustration  of  the  way  in 
which  his  mind  assimilated  new  truth,  and  even  an- 
ticipated it  by  some  intuitive  process.  In  the  pre- 
ceding chapter,  Browning's  remarkable  anticipation 
of  the  evolutionary  idea,  as  found  in  his  early  poem 
of  "Paracelsus,"  was  quoted.  Tennyson's  "In 
Memoriam"  affords  an  illustration  of  the  same  subject 
equally  remarkable  for  its  insight,  and  expressed 
with  a  refinement  of  poetic  art  far  beyond  anything 
of  which  Browning  was  capable. 

"Are  God  and  Nature  then  at  strife, 
That  Nature  lends  such  evil  dreams? 
So  careful  of  the  type  she  seems, 
So  careless  of  the  single  life. 

"'So  careful  of  the  type?'  but  no, 

From  scarped  cliff  and  quarried  stone 
She  cries,  'A  thousand  types  are  gone: 
I  care  for  nothing,  all  shall  go. 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  241 

**Thou  makest  thine  appeal  to  me: 
I  bring  to  life,  I  bring  to  death: 
The  spirit  does  but  mean  the  breath: 
I  know  no  more.'     And  he,  shall  he, 

"Man,  her  last  work,  who  seem'd  so  fair. 
Such  splendid  purpose  in  his  eyes. 
Who  roll'd  the  psalm  to  wintry  skies, 
Who  built  him  fanes  of  fruitless  prayer. 

Who  trusted  God  was  love  indeed 

And  love  Creation's  final  law — 

Tho'  Nature,  red  in  tooth  and  claw 
With  ravine,  shriek'd  against  his  creed — 

"Who  loved,  who  suffer'd  countless  ills. 
Who  battled  for  the  True,  the  Just, 
Be  blown  about  the  desert  dust, 
Or  seal'd  within  the  iron  hills? 

"Contemplate  all  this  work  of  Time, 
The  giant  labouring  in  his  youth; 
Nor  dream  of  human  love  and  truth. 
As  dying  Nature's  earth  and  lime; 

"But  trust  that  those  we  call  the  dead 
Are  breathers  of  an  ampler  day 
For  ever  nobler  ends.    They  say 
The  solid  earth  whereon  we  tread, 

"In  tracts  of  fluent  heat  began. 

And  grew  to  seeming-random  forms. 
The  seeming  prey  of  cyclic  storms. 
Till  at  the  last  arose  the  man; 

"Who  throve  and  branch'd  from  clime  to  clime, 
The  herald  of  a  higher  race. 
And  of  himself  in  higher  place. 
If  so  he  type  this  work  of  time 


242  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

"Within  himself,  from  more  to  more; 
Or,  crown'd  with  attributes  of  woe 
Like  glories,  move  his  course,  and  show 
That  life  is  not  as  idle  ore, 

"But  iron  dug  from  central  gloom, 
And  heated  hot  with  burning  fears. 
And  dipt  in  baths  of  hissing  tears. 
And  batter'd  with  the  shocks  of  doom 

"To  shape  and  use.    Arise  and  fly 
The  reeling  Faun,  the  sensual  feast; 
Move  upwards,  working  out  the  beast. 
And  let  the  ape  and  tiger  die." 

This  conception  of  man  as  engaged  in  the  task  of 
"working  out  the  beast,"  and  growing  to  full  moral 
nature  in  the  course  of  the  ages,  was  thus  familiar 
to  Tennyson  long  before  the  publication  of  "The 
Origin  of  Species"  and  "The  Descent  of  Man." 
Those  epoch-making  books  merely  served  to  confirm 
him  in  an  opinion  that  he  had  long  held — in  general 
terms,  to  be  sure, — but  definitely  enough  for  the 
purposes  of  poetry.  The  words  spoken  by  him  many 
years  later,  in  the  character  of  an  avowed  evolutionist, 
do  not  differ  greatly  in  their  meaning  from  those 
just  quoted  from  "In  Memoriam." 

"I  have  climb'd  to  the  snows  of  Age,  and  I  gaze  at  a  field  in  the 
Past, 
Where  I  sank  with  the  body  at  times  in  the  sloughs  of  a  low 
desire. 
But  I  hear  no  yelp  of  the  beast,  and  the  man  is  quiet  at  last 
As  he  stands  on  the  heights  of  his  life  with  a  glimpse  of  a 
height  that  is  higher." 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  243 

In  a  still  later  poem  than  this — one  of  the  very  last 
that  he  wrote — the  poet's  acceptance  of  the  principle 
of  continuous  development  is  once  more  affirmed,  and 
this  time  in  a  strain  of  prophetic  rapture.  The  poem 
is  called  "The  Making  of  Man." 

"Where  is  one  that,  born  of  woman,  altogether  can  escape 
From  the  lower  world  within  him,  moods  of  tiger,  or  of  ape? 
Man  as  yet  is  being  made,  and  ere  the  crowning  Age  of 
ages. 
Shall  not  aeon  after  aeon  pass  and  touch  him  into  shape?" 

"All  about  him  shadow  still,  but,  while  the  races  flower  and 

fade. 
Prophet-eyes  may  catch  a  glory  slowly  gaining  on  the  shade. 
Till  the  peoples  all  are  one,  and  all  their  voices  blend  in 
choric 
Hallelujah  to  the  Maker:  'It  is  finish'd.    Man  is  made.'" 

There  is  no  more  hopeful  and  inspiring  message  in 
our  poetry  than  these  words  contain — these  words 
that  come  to  us  from  the  poet's  ripest  age,  from 
the  spiritual  uplands  of  a  soul  that  sought  higher  and 
higher  altitudes  all  its  life  long. 

I  have  laid  so  much  stress  upon  the  exalted  beauty 
of  some  of  these  later  poems  because  it  has  been 
the  fashion  to  decry  them,  and  to  speak  slightingly  of 
them  as  the  product  of  declining  powers.  They 
are  the  product  of  the  poet's  age,  it  is  true,  not  of 
his  youth,  and  have  not  the  youthful  glow  and  ardour 
of  aspiration.  But  Tennyson's  Ulysses  long  ago 
reminded  us  that 


244  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

"Old  age  hath  yet  his  honour  and  his  toil; 
Death  closes  all :  but  something  ere  the  end, 
Some  work  of  noble  note,  may  yet  be  done. 
Not  unbecoming  men  that  strove  with  Gods." 

And  I  have  also  sought  to  show  that  these  later  poems 
have  a  hopefulness  of  their  own,  a  chastened  hopeful- 
ness, to  be  sure,  but  something  very  different  from 
the  pessimism  which  was  charged  against  Tennyson 
by  the  "chorus  of  indolent  reviewers"  when  the  sec- 
ond "Locksley  Hall"  made  its  appearance. 

"When  was  age  so  cramm'd  with  menace?  madness?  written, 
spoken  lies?" 

That  sounds  like  the  voice  of  despair,  indeed, — ^not  at 
all  like  the  voice  that  had  said  half  a  century  earlier : 

"Men,  my  brothers,  men  the  workers,  ever  reaping  something 

new: 
That  which  they  have  done  but  earnest  of  the  things  that  they 
shall  do." 

But  a  close  examination  of  the  first  "Locksley  Hall" 
will  disclose  almost  as  great  an  impatience  with  ex- 
isting conditions  as  the  second  poem  displays,  and 
in  both  cases  the  dramatic  element  must  be  taken 
into  account.  Tennyson  was  addicted  to  drawing 
sharp  moral  contrasts.  In  his  religious  poems  he 
depicted  the  depths  of  despair  that  he  might  more 
effectively  urge  his  message  of  hope;  he  plunged 
his  readers  once  and  again  into  "the  sunless  gulfs  of 
doubt"  that  they  might  the  more  fully  realise  the 
consolations  of  sunlit  faith.     In  the  second  "Locksley 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  245 

Hall,"  he  dips  his  brush  in  the  darkest  of  colours 
in  order  that  he  may  intensify  the  radiance  of  his 
prophetic  vista. 

"Earth  at  last  a  warless  world,  a  single  race,  a  single  tongue, 
I  have  seen  her  far  away — for  is  not  Earth  as  yet  so  young? 

"Every  tiger  madness  muzzled,  every  serpent  passion  kill'd. 
Every  grim  ravine  a  garden,  every  blazing  desert  till'd, 

"Robed  in  universal  harvest  up  to  either  pole  she  smiles. 
Universal  ocean  softly  washing  all  her  warless  Isles. 

"Far  away  beyond  her  myriad  coming  changes  earth  will  be 
"Something  other  than  the  wildest  modern  guess  of  you  and  me. 

"Forward  then,  but  still  remember  how  the  course  of  time  will 
swerve. 
Crook  and  turn  upon  itself  in  many  a  backward  streaming 
curve. 

"Follow  you  the  Star  that  lights  a  desert  pathway,  yours  or 
mine. 
Forward,  till  you  see  the  highest  Human  Nature  is  divine. 

"Follow  Light,  and  do  the  Right— for  man  can  half-control 
his  doom — 
Till  you  find  the  deathless  Angel  seated  in  the  vacant  tomb." 

It  is  for  such  gifts  as  these,  answering  to  the 
deepest  spiritual  needs  of  mankind,  that  Tennyson 
earned,  beyond  any  other  poet  of  his  time,  the  love, 
the  gratitude,  and  the  reverence  of  his  fellow-men. 
He  enforced  the  lesson  that  "all  life  needs  for  life  is 
possible  to  will."     He  showed  us  the  difference  be- 


246  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

tween  the  freedom  that  is  one  with  hcense,  and  the 
far  nobler  freedom  that  can  restrain  itself  from  ex- 
cess, that  "broadens  slowly  down  from  precedent  to 
precedent"  instead  of  convulsing  the  social  organism 
by  some  outburst  of  reckless  energy.  He  showed 
us  the  true  path  of  duty,  and  how 

"He  that  walks  it,  only  thirsting 
For  the  right,  and  learns  to  deaden 
Love  of  self,  before  his  journey  closes. 
He  shall  find  the  stubborn  thistle  bursting 
Into  glossy  purples,  which  outredden 
All  voluptuous  garden-roses." 

Nay,  more,  he  showed  us  how 

"He,  that  ever  following  her  commands, 
On  with  toil  of  heart  and  knees  and  hands. 
Thro'  the  long  gorge  to  the  far  light  has  won 
His  path  upward,  and  prevailed. 
Shall  find  the  topplings  crags  of  Duty  scaled 
Are  close  upon  the  shining  table-lands 
To  which  our  God  himself  is  moon  and  sun." 

And  all  those  things,  and  many  others,  came  to  us 
clothed  in  the  perfection  of  artistic  expression,  a 
perfection  so  supreme  that  we  can  only  liken  it  to 
that  of  the  greatest  poets  of  the  past,  of  Sophocles, 
Virgil,  and  Shakespeare.  It  is  because  of  this  mar- 
vellous gift  for  the  harmonious  arrangement  of 
words,  for  the  exquisite  chiselHng  of  phrases,  that 
Tennyson  stands  far  above  all  of  his  English  con- 
temporaries. So  royal  a  suzerainty  as  that  which 
he  has  exercised   over   the  poetry   of  the  Victorian 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  247 

age,  is  almost  unexampled  in  the  history  of  our  lit- 
erature. The  only  people  who  have  ever  seriously 
challenged  it  have  been  the  members  of  the  Browning 
Societies,  and  with  those  readers  who  in  good  faith 
believe  Browning  to  be  as  great  a  poet  as  Tennyson, 
or  even  a  greater,  it  is  difficult  to  argue.  They  are 
attracted  by  the  combined  subtlety  and  robustness 
of  Browning's  thought,  and  are  colour-blind  to  the 
glaring  defects  of  his  style.  Professor  Shorey  does 
not  seem  unduly  severe  when  he  says  that  what 
the  majority  of  Browning's  devotees 

"chiefly  admire  in  him  is  the  slangy  vehemence  with  which  he 
detaches  and  emphasises  ideas  that  fail  to  stimulate  their  at- 
tention when  expressed  in  quiet  artistic  English.  Tliey  de- 
liberately prefer  'God's  in  his  heaven,  all's  right  with  the 
world,'  to 

'And  hear  at  times  a  sentinel 

Who  moves  about  from  place  to  place. 
And  whispers  to  the  worlds  of  space 
In  the  deep  night  that  all  is  well.' 

Their  souls  are  strengthened  by  the  virile  if  cacophonous 
optimism  of 

*A11  the  same  of  absolute 

And  irretrievable  black — black's  soul  of  black — 

Beyond  white  power  to  disintensify. 

Of  that  I  saw  no  sample.     Such  may  wreck 

My  life  and  ruin  my  philosophy 

To-morrow  doubtless.' 

But  they  remain  cold  to  the  'elegant  virtuoso'  who  writes 

'Oh,  yet  we  trust  that  somehow  good 

Will  be  the  final  goal  of  ill. 

To  pangs  of  nature,  sins  of  will. 
Defects  of  doubt,  and  taints  of  blood; 


248  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

*That  nothing  walks  with  aimless  feet; 
That  not  one  life  shall  be  destroy'd 
Or  cast  as  rubbish  to  the  void, 
When  God  hath  made  the  pile  complete.' 

•You  that  way  and  we  this'  is  the  last  word  in  this  matter  of 
critics  whose  taste  has  been  formed  by  Homer,  Sophocles, 
Tennyson,  and  Virgil.  Yet  the  Tennysonian  may  safely  chal- 
lenge the  production  from  the  writings  of  the  competitors  for 
the  throne  of  modern  poetry,  of  one  sane  and  suggestive  ethical 
or  religious  idea  that  cannot  be  found  better  expressed  in 
Tennyson." 

Tennyson  died  in  1892,  at  the  age  of  eighty -three 
— the  age  of  Goethe,  and  a  few  months  more.  The 
scene  offered  by  the  closing  hour  of  his  Hfe  will  long 
remain  engraved  upon  the  memory.  The  midnight 
time,  the  full  harvest  moon  streaming  in  over  the 
Surrey  hills  and  flooding  the  chamber  with  light, 
the  august  head,  the  features  calm  save  for  lips 
that  murmured — what  other  words  so  fit  ? — 

"Fear  no  more  the  heat  o'  the  sun. 
Nor  the  furious  winter's  rages," — 

the  faces  of  the  mourners  stricken  with  grief  and 
awe  as  that  great  soul  faded  "into  the  unknown," — 
nothing  could  have  been  more  impressive;  nothing 
could  have  added  to  the  solemn  pathos  of  the  scene. 
It  will  be  remembered  that  "The  Silent  Voices,"  set 
to  music  by  Lady  Tennyson,  was  sung  at  the  funeral 
services  in  Westminster  Abbey.  Mr.  Theodore 
Watts-Dunton,  writing  a  sequence  of  sonnets  upon 


ALFRED  TENNYSON  249 

this  impressive  occasion,  makes  mention  of  the  fact 
in  the  following  beautiful  words: 

"Sweet  was  the  sweet  wife's  music,  and  consoling: 
The  past  returned:  I  heard  the  master's  talk. 
That  many  a  time  in  many  a  happy  walk 
I  heard  when  through  the  whin  of  Aldworth  strolling, 
Or  on  the  cliflfs  of  Wight  with  billows  rolling 
Below  the  jaggy  walls  of  gleaming  chalk: 
Again  I  saw  him  stay  his  giant-stalk 
To  watch  the  foamy-crested  breakers  shoaling. 

"And  when  the  music  ceased  and  pictures  fled 
I  walked  as  in  a  dream  around  the  grave, 

And  looked  adown  and  saw  the  flowers  outspread. 
And  spirit-voices  spake  from  aisle  and  nave: — 
•To  follow  him  be  true,  be  pure,  be  brave: 

Thou  needest  not  his  lyre,*  the  voices  said. 

"'Beyond  the  sun,  beyond  the  furthest  star. 

Shines  still  the  land  which  poets  still  may  win 
Whose  poems  are  their  lives — whose  souls  within 
Hold  naught  in  dread  save  Art's  high  conscience-bar — 
Who  have  for  muse  a  maiden  free  from  scar — 
Who  know  how  beauty  dies  at  touch  of  sin — 
Who  love  mankind,  yet,  having  Gods  for  kin. 
Breathe,  in  Life's  wood,  zephyrs  from  climes  afar. 

"  'Heedless  of  phantom  Fame — heedless  of  all 
Save  pity  and  love  to  light  the  life  of  Man — 
True  poets  work,  winning  a  sunnier  span 

For  Nature's  martyr — Night's  ancestral  thrall: 

True  poets  work,  yet  listen  for  the  call 

Bidding  them  join  their  country  and  their  clan.'" 

These  sonnets  might  fitly  close  the  present  discussion 
of  the  great  poet  to  whose  memory  I  have  brought 


250  ALFRED  TENNYSON 

the  tribute  of  what  poor  words  were  at  my  command. 
But  I  cannot  resist  the  temptation  to  reproduce  in 
addition  the  one  other  memorable  tribute  of  song 
evoked  from  an  English  poet  bj  the  passing  of  Alfred 
Tennyson.  The  words  that  follow  are  taken  from 
"Lacrymae  Musarum,"  Mr.  Wilham  Watson's  noble 
threnody,  and  are  worthy  of  their  lofty  theme. 

"In  far  retreats  of  elemental  mind 
Obscurely  comes  and  goes 

The  imperative  breath  of  song,  that  as  the  wind 
Is  trackless,  and  oblivious  whence  it  blows. 
Demand  of  lilies  wherefore  they  are  white. 
Extort  her  crimson  secret  from  the  rose, 
But  ask  not  of  the  Muse  that  she  disclose 
The  meaning  of  the  riddle  of  her  might: 
Somewhat  of  all  things  sealed  and  recondite. 
Save  the  enigma  of  herself,  she  knows. 
The  master  could  not  tell,  with  all  his  lore. 
Wherefore  he  sang,  or  whence  the  mandate  sped: 
Ev'n  as  the  linnet  sings,  so  I,  he  said; — 
Ah,  rather  as  the  imperial  nightingale. 
That  held  in  trance  the  ancient  Attic  shore. 
And  charms  the  ages  \\'ith  the  notes  that  o'er 
All  woodland  chants  immortally  prevail ! 
And  now,  from  our  vain  plaudits  greatly  fled. 
He  vrith  diviner  silence  dwells  instead. 
And  on  no  earthly  sea  with  transient  roar. 
Unto  no  earthly  airs,  he  trims  his  sail. 
But  far  beyond  our  vision  and  our  hail 
Is  heard  forever  and  is  seen  no  more." 


fiDattbew  HrnoI^ 

Man  is  a  creature  of  many  moods,  and  it  is  the 
function  of  poetry  to  remain  unresponsive  to  no  one 
of  them.  It  would  seem  as  though  Browning  and 
Tennyson  had  ranged  over  the  whole  diversified  field 
of  modern  emotion  and  modern  thought,  analysed 
all  the  complex  processes  of  the  modern  soul,  and  left 
nothing  for  other  poets  to  interpret.  Yet  there 
has  been  room  in  our  own  time  for  other  poets,  de- 
spite the  comprehensive  vision  of  these  two,  and  of 
those  others,  there  is,  perhaps,  none  whom  we  would 
spare  more  reluctantly  than  Matthew  Arnold.  Es- 
pecially to  those  who  cannot  share  the  robust  tem- 
peramental optimism  of  Browning,  and  whose  faith 
in  the  divine  order  of  the  world,  in  the  assured  future 
both  of  individual  man  and  collective  mankind,  has 
not,  like  that  of  Tennyson,  triumphantly  survived 
the  shock  of  doubt,  the  poetry  of  Arnold  comes  as 
one  of  the  most  precious  of  gifts.  For  such  readers, 
it  seems  to  afford  an  even  more  exact  and  intimate 
reflection  of  their  deepest  experience  than  the  imag- 
inings of  either  Tennyson  or  Browning.  It  seems 
less  specious  and  rhetorical;  more  direct  and  sincere. 
I  have  spoken  of  the  sharp  contrasts  which  Tenny- 
son was  fond  of  drawing  between   the  philosophies 

251 


252  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

of  doubt  and  of  faith.  There  is  something  ahnost 
theatrical  in  his  method  of  portraying  the  agonies 
of  the  soul  plunged  in  "the  sunless  gulfs  of  doubt," 
and  his  appeal  for  the  acceptance  of  the  fundamental 
articles  of  the  Christian  faith  is  made  rather  to 
the  heart  than  to  the  reason.  It  comes  near  to  de- 
feating itself  by  its  vehement  intensity  of  emotion. 
It  seems  unwilling  to  admit  the  possibility  of  a  secure 
resting-place  for  the  soul  outside  the  citadel  of  his- 
torical Christianity,  and  the  life  unfortified  by  these 
entrenchments  seems  a  mockery  of  every  noble  aspi- 
ration. The  essentials  of  Christian  belief  must  be 
true, 

"Else  earth  is  darkness  at  the  core, 
And  dust  and  ashes  all  that  is." 


But  the  pressure  of  our  modern  age,  the  widening  of 
our  modern  thought  with  the  process  of  the  suns, 
has  produced  a  type  of  jnind  which  is  forced  to  re- 
ject, sorrowfully  but  firmly,  much  of  the  religious 
teaching  of  the  past,  to  readjust  to  new  conditions 
the  old  beliefs,  to  find  new  sanctions  for  the  conduct 
of  the  upright  life.  This  spiritual  temper,  unwilling 
to  blink  what  it  conceives  to  be  falsehood,  yet  reso- 
lute to  uphold  the  dignity  of  man's  moral  nature 
when  the  props  of  dogma — when  what  builders  call 
the  "false  work"  of  the  structure — ^have  been  re- 
moved, may  be  illustrated  by  a  passage  in  which  Mr. 
Morley,  speaking  of  the  Savoyard  Vicar  of  Rousseau, 
contrasts  the  "infinite  unseen  which  is  in  truth  beyond 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  253 

contemplation  by  the  limited  faculties  of  man"  with 

"the  visible,  intelligible,  and  still  sublime  possibilities  of  the 
human  destiny — that  imperial  conception,  which  alone  can  shape 
an  existence  of  entire  proportion  in  all  its  parts,  and  leave  no 
natural  energy  of  life  idle  or  athirst.  Do  you  ask  for  sanc- 
tions ?  One  whose  conscience  has  been  strengthened  from  youth 
in  this  faith,  can  know  no  greater  bitterness  than  the  stain 
cast  by  wrong  act  or  unworthy  thought  on  the  high  memories 
with  which  he  has  been  used  to  walk,  and  the  discord  wrought 
in  hopes  that  have  become  the  ruling  harmony  of  his  days." 

It  is  to  spirits  tempered  by  such  experiences  as  these 
that  the  poetry  of  Arnold  makes  its  special  appeal. 
They  have  parted  with  all  that  is  formal  and  dog- 
matic in  the  current  religious  belief,  but  they  have 
saved  its  spiritual  essence,  and  this  they  have  come 
to  cherish  more  deeply  than  they  could  when  it  was 
still  confused  with  its  historical  accretions.  There  is 
something  of  stoicism  in  this  attitude,  but  there  is 
also  something  more.  Ruskin  is  only  half-sympa- 
thetic when  he  says:  "A  brave  belief  in  death  has 
been  assuredly  held  by  many  not  ignoble  persons ;  and 
it  is  a  sign  of  the  last  depravity  in  the  Church  itself, 
when  it  assumes  that  such  a  belief  is  inconsistent  with 
either  purity  of  character,  or  energy  of  hand,"  and 
then  extends  his  condolences  to  those  "men  for  whom 
feebleness  of  sight,  or  bitterness  of  soul,  or  the  offence 
given  by  the  conduct  of  those  who  claim  higher  hope, 
may  have  rendered  this  painful  creed  the  only  pos- 
sible one."  There  is  neither  feebleness  of  sight  nor 
bitterness  of  soul — there  is  at  most  the  tinge  of  mel- 


254  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

ancholy  resignation — in  the  beautiful  lines  which 
embody  Arnold's  acceptance  of  the  possibiHty  which 
seemed  to  Tennyson  so  intolerable. 

"But  is  a  calm  like  this,  in  truth, 
The  crowning  end  of  life  and  youth. 
And  when  this  boon  rewards  the  dead, 
Are  all  debts  paid,  has  all  been  said? 
And  is  the  heart  of  youth  so  light. 
Its  steps  so  firm,  its  eye  so  bright, 
Because  on  its  hot  brow  there  blows 
A  wind  of  promise  and  repose 
From  the  far  grave,  to  which  it  goes; 
Because  it  hath  the  hope  to  come. 
One  day,  to  harbour  in  the  tomb? 
Ah  no,  the  bliss  youth  dreams  is  one 
For  daylight,  for  the  cheerful  sun. 
For  feeling  nerves  and  living  breath — 
Youth  dreams  a  bliss  on  this  side  death. 
It  dreams  a  rest,  if  not  more  deep. 
More  grateful  than  this  marble  sleep; 
It  hears  a  voice  within  it  tell: 
Calm's  not  life's  crown,  though  calm  is  well. 
'Tis  all  perhaps  which  man  acquires. 
But  'tis  not  what  our  youth  desires." 

One  of  Arnold's  most  beautiful  poems,  "In  Utrumque 
Paratus,"  bids  us  be  prepared  for  either  of  the  al- 
ternatives which  seem  to  be  presented  to  the  mind 
by  this  bewildering  universe.  Whether  this  visible 
world  be  in  very  fact  the  unfolding  of  the  thought 
of  God,  or  "if  the  wild  unfather'd  mass  no  birth  in 
divine  seats  hath  known,"  the  soul  has  resources  of 
its  own  wherewith  to  confront  undaunted  even  the 
latter   alternative,   and   to   stand   erect   in   its   own 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  265 

strength.  Much  of  Arnold's  verse  reflects  this  calm 
of  stoic  souls,  who  have  learned 

"Life  well,  and  find  it  wanting,  nor  deplore; 
But  in  disdainful  silence  turn  away, 
Stand  mute,  self-centred,  stern,  and  dream  no  more." 

This  is  far  from  being  a  merely  negative  attitude. 
Over  and  over  again  we  come  upon  passages  which 
clothe  the  poet's  thought  in  the  raiment  of  positive 
faith.  The  overworked  preacher  toiling  in  the  slums 
of  London  evokes  this  outcry : 

"O  human  soul !  as  long  as  thou  canst  so 
Set  up  a  mark  of  everlasting  light. 
Above  the  howling  senses'  ebb  and  flow, 

"To  cheer  thee,  and  to  right  thee  if  thou  roam — 
Not  lost  with  toil  thou  labourest  through  the  night! 
Thou  mak'st  the  heaven  thou  hop'st  indeed  thy  home." 

It  is,  moreover,  a  militant  faith,  as  we  learn  from 
such  a  poem  as  "The  Last  Word,"  which  urges  the 
soul  on  to  struggle  even  in  the  most  desperate 
adversity. 

"Creep  into  thy  narrow  bed. 
Creep,  and  let  no  more  be  said! 
Vain  thy  onset!  all  stands  fast. 
Thou  thyself  must  break  at  last. 

"Let  the  long  contention  cease ! 
Geese  are  swans,  and  swans  are  geese. 
Let  them  have  it  how  they  will! 
Thou  art  tired;  best  be  still. 


256  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

"They  out-talk'd  thee,  hiss'd  thee,  tore  thee? 
Better  men  fared  thus  before  thee; 
Fired  their  ringing  shot  and  pass'd. 
Hotly  charged — and  sank  at  last. 

"Charge  once  more,  then,  and  be  dumb  I 
Let  the  victors,  when  they  come. 
When  the  forts  of  folly  faU, 
Find  thy  body  by  the  wall!" 

Like  the  Trojan  Palladium,  the  soul  may  at  times 
appear  to  us  as  something  apart  from  life,  con- 
trolling life  from  some  far-off  moonlit  height. 

"Still  doth  the  soul,  from  its  lone  fastness  high, 
Upon  our  life  a  ruling  effluence  send. 
And  when  it  fails,  fight  as  we  will,  we  die; 
And  while  it  lasts,  we  cannot  wholly  end." 

Briefer  and  more  pithy  phrases  expressing  the  same 
attitude  toward  life  will  occur  to  the  mind  of  every 
reader.  "The  aids  to  noble  life  are  all  within,"  for 
example,  or, 

"Resolve  to  be  thyself,  and  know  that  he 
Who  finds  himself,  loses  his  misery." 

This  philosophy  of  the  self-contained  soul  finds  its 

fullest  expression  in  the  solemn  monologue  of  Em- 

pedocles,  spoken  as  he  stands  alone  upon  the  heights 

of  Etna. 

"Once  read  thy  own  breast  right. 
And  thou  hast  done  with  fears; 
Man  gets  no  other  light, 
Search  he  a  thousand  years. 
Sink  in  thyself !  there  ask  what  ails  thee,  at  that  shrine ! 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  257 

"We  would  have  inward  peace, 
Yet  will  not  look  within; 
We  would  have  misery  cease. 
Yet  will  not  cease  from  sin; 
We  want  all  pleasant  ends,  but  will  use  no  harsh  means; 

"We  do  not  what  we  ought. 
What  we  ought  not,  we  do, 
And  lean  upon  the  thought 
That  chance  will  bring  us  through; 
But  our  own  acts,  for  good  or  ill,  are  mightier  powers. 

"Is  it  so  small  a  thing 
To  have  enjoy'd  the  sun. 
To  have  lived  in  the  spring. 
To  have  loved,  to  have  thought,  to  have  done; 
To  have  advanced  true  friends,  and  beat  down  baffling  foes — 

"That  we  must  feign  a  bliss 
Of  doubtful  future  date, 
And,  while  we  dream  on  this. 
Lose  all  our  present  state. 
And  relegate  to  worlds  yet  distant  our  repose?" 

This  is  the  ripe  wisdom  to  which  Faust  attained, 
after  having  learned  to  know  the  greater  and  lesser 
worlds.  We  cannot  help  recalling  those  pregnant 
words  which  Goethe  places  upon  the  lips  of  Faust 
in  that  wonderful  scene  of  the  midnight  visit  of  Want 
and  Guilt  and  Care  and  Necessity,  I  quote  from 
Taylor's  translation: 

"This  sphere  of  Earth  is  known  enough  to  me; 
The  view  beyond  is  barred  immutably: 
A  fool,  who  there  his  blinking  eyes  directeth. 
And  o'er  his  clouds  of  peers  a  place  expecteth! 


258  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

Firm  let  him  stand,  and  look  around  him  well ! 
This  World  means  something  to  the  Capable, 
Why  needs  he  through  Eternity  to  wend? 
He  here  acquires  what  he  can  apprehend." 

Swinburne,  writing  of  the  noble  monologue  of 
Empedocles,  quotes  Arnold's  own  words,  spoken 
of  Epictetus,  to  the  effect  that  "the  fortitude  of 
that  is  for  the  strong,  for  the  few;  even  for  them, 
the  spiritual  atmosphere  with  which  it  surrounds 
them  is  bleak  and  grey,"  and  goes  on  to  say  upon 
his  own  account  that 

**it  is  no  small  or  common  comfort,  after  all  the  delicate  and 

ingenious  shuffling  of  other  English  poets  about  the  edge  of 
deep  things,  to  come  upon  one  who  speaks  with  so  large  and 
clear  and  calm  an  utterance;  who  begins  at  the  taproot  and 
wellspring  of  the  matter,  leaving  others  to  wade  ankle-deep  in 
still  waters  and  weave  river-flags  or  lake-lilies  in  lieu  of  stem- 
ming the  stream.  Nothing  in  verse  is  more  wearisome  than 
the  delivery  of  reluctant  doubt,  of  half-hearted  hope  and  half- 
incredulous  faith.  A  man  who  suffers  from  the  strong  desire 
either  to  believe  or  disbelieve  something  he  cannot,  may  be 
worthy  of  s}Tnpathy,  is  certainly  worthy  of  pity,  until  he  be- 
gins to  speak;  and  if  he  tries  to  speak  in  verse,  he  misuses  the 
implement  of  an  artist.  We  have  had  evidences  of  religion, 
aspirations  and  suspirations  of  all  kinds,  melodious  regrets 
and  tortuous  returns  in  favour  of  this  creed  or  that — all  by  way 
of  poetic  work;  and  all  within  the  compass  and  shot-range 
of  a  single  faith;  all,  at  the  widest,  bounded  north,  south,  east, 
and  west  by  material  rivers  or  hills,  by  an  age  or  two  since, 
by  a  tradition  or  two ;  all  lea\ing  the  spirit  cramped  and  thirsty. 
We  have  had  Christian  sceptics,  handcuffed  fighters,  tongue- 
tied  orators,  plume-plucked  eagles;  believers  whose  belief  was 
a  sentiment,  and  free-thinkers  who  saw  nothing  before  Christ 
or  beyond  Judea.  To  get  at  the  bare  rock  is  a  relief  after 
acres  of  such  quaking  ground." 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  259 

Arnold  confronts  the  dark  problem  of  the  grave,  ^ 
not,  as  Tennyson  did,  with  the  agony  of  a  self- 
tortured  spirit,  passionately  clinging  to  the  one  solu- 
tion upon  which  the  heart  is  set,  and  finding  no  pos- 
sibility of  solace  in  any  other,  but  rather  with  a 
spirit  which  is  ready  to  acquiesce  in  the  order  of 
the  universe^  whatever  that  order  may  be,  and  to 
live  a  life  no  less  strenuous  for  the  abandonment  of 
the  certainty  of  its  conscious  prolongation  after 
death.  "Hath  man  no  second  life? — Pitch  this  one 
high!" — Such  is  Arnold's  essential  message,  and  it 
has  an  inspiration,  an  ethical  energy,  that  we  do  not 
get  from  Tennyson's  utterances  upon  the  same  theme. 
"The  free  man,"  says  Spinoza,  "thinks  of  nothing 
less  than  of  death."  It  is  in  the  spirit  of  that  great 
saying  that  Arnold  wrote  the  following  sonnet: 

"Foil'd  by  our  fellow-men,  depress'd,  outworn, 
We  leave  the  brutal  world  to  take  its  way. 
And,  Patience  I  in  another  life,  we  say, 
The  world  shall  be  thrust  down,  and  we  up-borne. 

And  will  not,  then,  the  immortal  armies  scorn 
The  world's  poor,  routed  leavings?  or  will  they. 
Who  fail'd  under  the  heat  of  this  life's  day. 
Support  the  fervours  of  the  heavenly  morn? 

No,  no !  the  energy  of  life  may  be 
Kept  on  after  the  grave,  but  not  begun; 
And  he  who  flagg'd  not  in  the  earthly  strife. 
From  strength  to  strength  advancing — only  he. 
His  soul  well-knit,  and  all  his  battles  won. 
Mounts,  and  that  hardly,  to  eternal  life." 


260  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

It  is  the  fashion  to  call  Arnold  a  poet  of  despair, 
and  it  is  easy  to  make  selections  from  his  verse  which 
will  lend  colour  to  that  view.  Certainly,  "his  sad 
lucidity  of  soul"  has  little  in  common  with  the  burly 
temper  of  such  an  optimist  as  Browning,  or  with 
the  buoyancy  of  spirit  that  we  often  find  in  Tenny- 
son and  always  in  Shelley.  It  would  be  difficult  to 
express  the  mood  of  pure  pessimism  more  absolutely 
than  it  is  expressed  in  the  closing  lines  of  "Dover 
Beach,"  quoted  in  a  previous  chapter.  And  the 
many  passages  in  which  the  poet  seems  to  bewail 
the  fate  that  made  him  the  child  of  an  age  of  laps- 
ing faith,  and  to  look  longingly  back  upon  those 
earlier  ages  when  men  might  beheve  things  now  im- 
possible to  the  cultured  mind,  fill  us,  no  doubt,  with 
the  sense  of  spiritual  tragedy.  Yet  the  note  of  calm- 
ness, of  spiritual  serenity,  which,  as  I  have  already 
urged,  is  more  than  the  merely  sJ:oical  acceptance  of 
the  common  lot  of  human  suffering,  seems  to  me,  on 
the  whole,  the  prevailing  note  of  Arnold's  poetry. 
It  is  the  note  that  we  find,  for  example,  in  this  well- 
known  stanza: 

"Calm  soul  of  all  things  I  make  it  mine 
To  feel,  amid  the  city's  jar, 
That  there  abides  a  peace  of  thine, 
Man  did  not  make,  and  cannot  mar." 

Sometimes  this  sense  of  deep  and  abiding  peace  comes 
to  us  as  an  echo  of  the  Wordsworthian  spirit,  al- 
though tinged  with  the  reflection  that  Wordsworth's 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  261 

philosophy  has  been  tested  and  found  less  adequate 
than  it  once  seemed  to  meet  the  deepest  spiritual 
needs  of  mankind. 

"Enough,  we  live! — and  if  a  life. 
With  large  results  so  little  rife. 
Though  bearable,  seem  hardly  worth 
This  pomp  of  worlds,  this  pain  of  birth; 
Yet,  Fausta,  the  mute  turf  we  tread, 
The  solemn  hills  around  us  spread, 
This  stream  which  falls  incessantly, 
The  strange-scrawl'd  rocks,  the  lonely  sky. 
If  I  might  lend  their  life  a  voice. 
Seem  to  bear  rather  than  rejoice. 
And  even  could  the  intemperate  prayer 
Man  iterates,  while  these  forbear. 
For  movement,  for  an  ampler  sphere, 
Pierce  Fate's  impenetrable  ear; 
Not  milder  is  the  general  lot 
Because  our  spirits  have  forgot, 
In  action's  dizzying  eddy  whirl'd. 
The  something  that  infects  the  world." 

Sometimes  it  comes  to  us  almost  unburdened  by  the 
weight  of  the  world's  mischance,  and  restores  the  soul 
that  has  grown  faint  in  the  world's  strife.    Then 

"A  bolt  is  shot  back  somewhere  in  our  breast. 
And  a  lost  pulse  of  feeling  stirs  again. 
The  eye  sinks  inward,  and  the  heart  lies  plain. 
And  what  we  mean,  we  say,  and  what  we  would,  we  know. 
A  man  becomes  aware  of  his  life's  flow. 
And  hears  its  winding  murmur;  and  he  sees 
The  meadows  where  it  glides,  the  sun,  the  breeze. 
And  there  arrives  a  lull  in  the  hot  race 
Wherein  he  doth  forever  chase 


V 


262  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

That  flying  and  elusive  shadow,  rest. 
An  air  of  coolness  plays  upon  his  face. 
And  an  unwonted  calm  pervades  his  breast. 
And  then  he  thinks  he  knows 
The  hills  where  his  life  rose. 
And  the  sea  where  it  goes." 

Sometimes,  again,  it  previsions  a  future  when  man 
and  nature  shall  become  so  merged,  when  the  spirit 
of  man  shall  be  so  completely  in  harmony  with  the 
spirit  of  the  universe,  that  the  questionings  of  our 
restless  age  will  no  longer  have  power  to  perplex, 
and  Hfe  will  no  longer  offer  so  distressing  a  con- 
trast between  aim  and  achievement. 

"Haply,  the  river  of  Time- 
As  it  grows,  as  the  towns  on  its  marge. 
Fling  their  wavering  lights 
On  a  wider,  statelier  stream — 
May  acquire,  if  not  the  calm 
Of  its  early  mountainous  shore. 
Yet  a  solemn  peace  of  its  own. 
And  the  width  of  the  waters,  the  hush 
Of  the  grey  expanse  where  he  floats. 
Freshening  its  current  and  spotted  with  foam 
As  it  draws  to  the  Ocean,  may  strike 
Peace  to  the  soul  of  the  man  on  its  breast — 
As  the  pale  waste  widens  around  him. 
As  the  banks  fade  dimmer  away. 
As  the  stars  come  out,  and  the  night-wind 
Brings  up  the  stream 
Murmurs  and  scents  of  the  infinite  sea." 

In  these  deep  moods  the  poet  seems  haunted  by  that 
feeling  of  the  unreality  of  tliis  world  of  space  and 
time  which  comes  now  and  then  with  overwhelming 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  263 

force  to  all  thoughtful  men;  the  feehng  that 
prompted   the   profoundest   utterances   of   the   poet 

who  tells  us  that 

"We  are  such  stuff 
As  dreams  are  made  on;" 

the  feeling  that 

"This  earth,  this  vale  whereon  we  dream," 

is  a  thing  in  and  of  ourselves ;  the  feeling  that  indi- 
vidual existence  is  but  a  transitory  illusion,  and  that, 
although  we  are  for  a  brief  space 

"In  the  sea  of  life  enisled 
With  echoing  straits  between  us  thrown," 

there  is  a  unity  in  existence  which  knows  nothing 

of  the  individual;  that  surely  once 

"We  were 
Parts  of  a  single  continent," 

although  for  a  time  there  lie  between  us 

"The  unplumbed,  salt,  estranging  sea." 

Swinburne  has  given  exquisite  expression  to  the 
quality  of  high  serenity  in  Arnold's  verse  which  I 
have  sought  to  illustrate  by  means  of  the  preceding 
quotations.  "In  his  best  work  there  is  always  rest, 
and  air,  and  a  high  relief;  it  satisfies,  enlarges,  re- 
freshes with  its  cool  full  breath  and  serenity.  .  .  . 
His  poetry  is  a  pure  temple,  a  white  flower  of  marble, 
unfretted  without  by  intricate  and  grotesque  tracer- 
ies, unvexed  within  by  fumes  of  shaken  censers  or 


264  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

intoning  of  hoarse  choristers;  large  and  clear  and 
cool,  with  many  chapels  in  it  and  outer  courts,  full 
of  quiet  and  of  music." 

In  deahng  with  the  great  intellectual  and  spiritual 
movements  of  civilisation,  Arnold  showed  a  fine  histor- 
ical sense,  which  enabled  liim  to  enter  with  deep  sym- 
pathy into  modes  of  thought  which  had  become  for 
himself  outworn.  This  is  particularly  true  of  his 
study  of  historical  Christianity,  and  he  was  unfail- 
ing in  his  sympathy  with  a  faith  to  which  he  could 
not  give  intellectual  assent. 

"The  sea  of  faith 
Was  once,  too,  at  the  full,  and  round  earth's  shore 
Lay  like  the  folds  of  a  bright  girdle  furl'd. 
But  now  I  only  hear 
Its  melancholy,  long,  withdrawing  roar. 
Retreating,  to  the  breath 

Of  the  night-wind,  down  the  vast  edges  drear 
And  naked  shingles  of  the  world." 

Swinburne,  who  is  conspicuously  lacking  in  the  his- 
torical sense  wliich  Arnold  possessed  in  so  full  a 
measure,  makes  a  reproach  of  "this  occasional  habit 
of  harking  back  and  loitering  in  mind  among  the 
sepulchres."  But  for  most  intelhgent  readers  of 
Arnold  the  poems  which  embod}^  this  phase  of  retro- 
spection are  among  the  most  precious  of  all,  they 
are  the  poems  which  make  the  deepest  appeal  to  our 
deepest  instincts.  Those  "Stanzas  from  the  Grande 
Chartreuse,"  for  example,  who  can  ever  forget  their 
sweet  and  melancholv  cadence.'^ 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  265 

"I  come  not  here  to  be  your  foe! 
I  seek  these  anchorites,  not  in  ruth, 
To  curse  and  to  deny  your  truth; 

"Not  as  their  friend,  or  child,  I  speak! 
But  as,  on  some  far  northern  strand. 
Thinking  of  his  own  Gods,  a  Greek 
In  pity  and  mournful  awe  might  stand 
Before  some  fallen  Runic  stone — 
For  both  were  faiths,  and  both  are  gone. 

"Wandering  between  two  worlds,  one  dead. 
The  other  powerless  to  be  born. 
With  nowhere  yet  to  rest  my  head. 
Like  these,  on  earth  I  wait  forlorn. 
Their  faith,  my  tears,  the  world  deride — 
I  come  to  shed  them  at  their  side." 

And  there  are  probably  no  verses  of  Arnold  more 
frequently  quoted  than  those  from  the  second  "Ober- 
mann,"  which  describe  the  coming  of  Christianity 
to  the  jaded  civilisation  of  the  ancient  world. 

"On  that  hard  Pagan  world  disgust 
And  secret  loathing  fell. 
Deep  weariness  and  sated  lust 
Made  human  life  a  hell. 

"In  his  cool  hall,  with  haggard  eyes. 
The  Roman  noble  lay; 
He  drove  abroad,  in  furious  guise. 
Along  the  Appian  way. 

"He  made  a  feast,  drank  fierce  and  fast, 
And  crown'd  his  hair  with  flowers — 
No  easier  nor  no  quicker  pass'd 
The  impracticable  hours." 


266  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

Then  came  that  strange  voice  from  "the  brooding 
East"  to  which  the  Roman  world  hstened,  first  with 
amazement  and  then  with  recognition  of  its  deep 
meaning. 

"She  veil'd  her  eagles,  snapp'd  her  sword. 
And  laid  her  sceptre  down; 
Her  stately  purple  she  abhorr'd. 
And  her  imperial  crown. 

"She  broke  her  flutes,  she  stopp'd  her  sports, 
Her  artists  could  not  please; 
She  tore  her  books,  she  shut  her  courts. 
She  fled  her  palaces. 

"Lust  of  the  eye  and  pride  of  life 
She  left  it  all  behind. 
And  hurried,  torn  with  inward  strife. 
The  wilderness  to  find. 

"Tears  wash'd  the  trouble  from  her  face! 
She  changed  into  a  child ! 
'Mid  weeds  and  wrecks  she  stood — a  place 
Of  ruin — but  she  smiled! 

"Oh,  had  I  lived  in  that  great  day. 
How  had  its  glory  new 
Fill'd  earth  and  heaven,  and  caught  away 
My  ravish'd  spirit  too!" 

These  words  are  attributed  to  the  shade  of  Ober- 
mann,  but  they  are  more  than  dramatic,  and  it  is 
perfectly  obvious  to  all  who  know  Arnold's  way  of 
thinking  that  their  note  of  passionate  longing  and 
regret  issued  from  the  poet's  own  heart. 

Arnold's   poetical   productivity   lasted   for   about 
twenty  years.     His  first  volume  of  verse  appeared  in 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  267 

1849,  and  the  "New  Poems"  in  1867.  He  lived  and 
wrote  for  some  twenty  years  longer,  but,  during 
those  twenty  years  he  made  prose  practically  the 
sole  vehicle  of  his  thought.  There  are  only  about 
half  a  dozen  poems  altogether,  and  those  of  an  occa- 
sional character,  which  bear  a  date  later  than  that 
of  the  "New  Poems."  He  carried  on  into  his  prose 
writings  something  of  the  spirit  and  many  of  the 
preoccupations  of  his  verse,  as  will  presently  be  seen. 
Before  taking  leave  of  his  poetry  as  a  whole,  I  wish 
to  consider  two  or  three  features  that  have  not 
hitherto  been  mentioned.  In  his  very  earliest  verse, 
we  find  those  two  significant  sonnets  addressed  "To 
a  Republican  Friend,  1848,"  which  foreshadow  what 
was  to  be  the  constant  conservatism  of  his  attitude 
toward  the  politics  of  his  time.  "God  knows  it,  I 
am  with  you,"  he  says,  if  your  aim  is  to  better  the 
condition  of  the  homeless  and  unfed,  to  help  men  to 
a  deeper  view  of  life  than  is  found  in  the  shallow 
optimism  of  our  age,  to  restore  to  the  soul  of  man 
something  of  its  lost  heritage.  But  we  must  not 
expect  too  much  of  revolutions,  and  it  is  the  freedom 
of  the  spirit  that  we  should  seek  rather  than  the 
external  freedom  that  constitutes  the  ideal  of  poli- 
ticians.    For  our  life 


'Is  on  all  sides  o'ershadowed  by  the  high 
Uno'erleap'd  Mountains  of  Necessity, 
Sparing  us  narrower  margin  than  we  deem. 
Nor  will  that  day  dawn  at  a  human  nod. 
When,  bursting  through  the  network  superposed 


268  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

By  selfish  occupation — plot  and  plan, 

Lust,  avarice,  envy — liberated  man. 

All  diflFerence  with  his  fellow-mortal  closed, 

Shall  be  left  standing  face  to  face  with  God." 

The  later  stanzas  on  the  French  Revolution  are  won- 
derfully picturesque  and  vivid  in  their  imagery,  but 
they  recognise  the  fact  that  the  mightiest  of  all 
modern  social  upheavals  failed  to  accomplish  the 
true  liberation  of  the  individual  soul. 

"Down  came  the  storm!    In  ruins  fell 
The  worn-out  world  we  knew. 
It  pass'd,  that  elemental  swell ! 
Again  appear'd  the  blue; 

"The  sun  shone  in  the  new-wash'd  sky. 
And  what  from  heaven  saw  he? 
Blocks  of  the  past,  like  icebergs  high. 
Float  on  a  rolling  sea! 

"The  millions  suffer  still,  and  grieve. 
And  what  can  helpers  heal 
With  old-world  cures  men  half  believe 
For  woes  they  wholly  feel? 

"And  yet  men  have  such  need  of  joy  I 
But  joy  whose  grounds  are  true; 
And  joy  that  should  all  hearts  employ 
As  when  the  past  was  new." 

If  this  work  were  concerned  with  literary  criticism 
in  the  narrower  sense,  many  features  of  Arnold's 
poetry  would  demand  more  than  the  passing  mention 
which  it  is  now  alone  possible  to  make.     I  should 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  269 

have  to  discuss  such  things  as  the  constant  pervasion 
of  his  verse  by  the  Greek  spirit,  the  chaste  loveliness 
of  his  lyrics,  the  fehcity  of  his  occasional  pieces, 
and  the  noble  beauty  of  his  elegiac  song.  To  the 
later,  particularly,  much  attention  would  need  to  be 
given,  for  the  poet  of  "Thyrsis"  challenges  compari- 
son with  the  poet  of  "Lycidas,"  and  the  lines  dedi- 
cated to  Wordsworth  and  to  Heine  are  almost  equally 
memorable.  But  other  matters,  having  to  do  with 
his  thought  rather  than  his  art,  are  insistent  in  their 
claim  upon  our  attention.  Arnold's  own  judgment 
upon  his  poems  is  extremely  interesting,  and  the 
claim  which  he  made  for  them  is  not  unreasonable. 
"My  poems,"  he  said,  "represent  the  main  movement 
of  mind  of  the  last  quarter  of  a  century,  and  thus 
they  will  probably  have  their  day  as  people  become 
conscious  to  themselves  of  what  that  movement  of 
mind  is,  and  interested  in  the  literary  productions 
which  reflect  it.  It  might  be  fairly  urged  that  I  have 
less  poetical  sentiment  than  Tennyson  and  less  intel- 
lectual vigour  and  abundance  than  Browning;  yet, 
because  I  have,  perhaps,  more  of  a  fusion  of  the 
two  than  either  of  them,  and  have  more  regularly 
applied  that  fusion  to  the  main  line  of  modern  de- 
velopment, I  am  likely  enough  to  have  my  turn  as 
they  have  had  theirs."  Arnold  is  not  likely  to  have 
his  turn  as  a  poet  in  the  sense  in  which  Browning  and 
Tennyson  have  had  theirs,  but  he  is  likely  to  hold  his 
audience,  and  even  to  increase  it,  during  the  coming 
years.    He  has  hardly  more  of  the  elements  of  popu- 


270  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

larity  than  Landor  had,  but  he  has  equal  reason  to 
be  proud  of  the  quality  of  his  limited  following. 

Among  the  preoccupations  which  Arnold  carried 
over  into  his  prose  from  his  verse,  none  are  more  im- 
portant than  those  which  relate  to  ethical  and  re- 
ligious questions.  That  conduct  is  three-fourths  of 
life,  is  a  maxim  he  never  ceased  to  reiterate,  and 
to  enforce  with  a  seriousness  none  the  less  real  be- 
cause sometimes  disguised  by  the  playful  vivacity  of 
his  manner.  The  influence  exercised  upon  rehgious 
thought  by  those  famous  books,  "Literature  and 
Dogma"  and  "God  and  the  Bible,"  has  been  both 
far-reaching  and  profound.  It  is  an  influence  which 
professional  theologians,  with  a  sense  of  alarm 
heightened  by  the  suspicion  that  there  was  even  more 
in  the  argument  than  they  could  understand,  have 
done  their  best  to  minimise.  Those  books,  so  unlike 
the  dull  tomes  which  their  subjects  naturally  suggest, 
may  be  lacking  in  exact  scholarship,  and  the  latest 
developments  of  the  higher  criticism  may  have  ren- 
dered some  of  their  positions  untenable,  but  their 
fundamental  logic  remains  unanswerable,  and  the 
spirit  of  sweet  reasonableness  which  informs  them 
will  long  remain  potent  to  shape  the  rehgious  con- 
sciousness of  open-minded  readers.  Their  rational 
and  gracious  conception  of  Christianity  has  proved 
a  comfort  to  countless  thousands  of  inquiring  spirits 
who  might,  save  for  this  soothing  ministry,  have 
been  driven  to  the  extreme  of  revolt.  Such  testi- 
mony to  their  influence  as  has  been  recently  given 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  271 

us  by  Mr.  Arthur  Galton  is  very  significant.  He 
says:  "That  I  held  to  any  sort  of  Christianity,  and 
continued  to  use  and  enjoy  the  Bible,  I  owe  entirely 
to  Matthew  Arnold.  ...  He  undoubtedly  saved  me 
from  leaving  the  Papal  Church  a  blind  and  blank 
materialist,  thoroughly  and  violently  anti-Christian, 
and  his  gentle  influence  tended  me  through  the  next 
few  years,  until  I  was  mellowed  for  a  process  of 
reconstruction."  What  Arnold  did  for  this  writer 
he  has  done  for  innumerable  others,  and  it  is  no 
slight  thing  to  have  won  such  gratitude  as  is  here 
expressed.  In  a  transitional  age  like  this,  when  re- 
ligious thought  is  undergoing  so  profound  a  trans- 
formation, the  problem  of  religious  teaching  for  the 
young  is  a  very  serious  one.  The  substitutes  for 
the  traditional  teaching  are  far  from  satisfactory, 
but  if  we  adhere  to  the  old  methods,  and  leave  to  a 
later  period  the  inculcation  of  the  more  rational  view, 
there  is  always  the  danger  that  when  the  grown-up 
child  comes  into  his  intellectual  estate  he  will  be  so 
indignant  at  the  way  in  which  he  was  dealt  with 
during  his  early  years  that  he  will  lose  not  only  faith 
but  the  possibilities  of  faith.  The  feeling  of  having 
been  tricked,  of  having  been  taught  things  which 
were  known  to  be  false,  has  a  very  unfortunate  effect 
upon  a  young  man's  mind.  We  saw  the  effect  which 
it  had  upon  Shelley;  we  have  just  seen  the  effect 
which  it  had  upon  the  mind  of  a  modern  young  man. 
To  restore  to  its  normal  balance  a  mind  in  this  per- 
turbed stage  of  its  development  is  no  easy  task,  and 


272  IMATTHEW  ARNOLD 

a  book  that  can  help  toward  such  a  restoration  is 
engaged  in  a  most  beneficent  work.  Now  "Litera- 
ture and  Dogma"  is  just  such  a  book  as  this;  it 
appeals  strongly  to  the  inquiring  mind,  it  offers  no 
outrage  to  the  reason,  it  soothes  the  injured  sensi- 
bihties,  and  creates  in  its  readers  a  sense  of  having 
gained  something  more  precious  than  all  that  has 
been  lost.    "I  write,"  says  Arnold, 

"to  convince  the  lover  of  religion  that  by  following  habits  of 
intellectual  seriousness  he  need  not,  so  far  as  religion  is  con- 
cerned, lose  amiJiing.  Taking  the  Old  Testament  as  Israel's 
magnificent  establishment  of  the  theme,  Righteousness  is  salva- 
tion! taking  the  New  as  the  perfect  elucidation  by  Jesus  of 
what  righteousness  is  and  how  salvation  is  won,  I  do  not  fear 
comparing  even  the  power  over  the  soul  and  imagination  of  the 
Bible,  taken  in  this  sense, — a  sense  which  is  at  the  same  time 
solid, — with  the  like  power  in  the  old  materialistic  and  mirac- 
ulous sense  for  the  Bible,  which  is  not." 


We  get  from  Arnold's  writings,  in  the  words  of 
Mr.  Forman,  "a  gospel  of  ideas  as  opposed  to  the 
many  gospels  of  practice."  To  have  clear  ideas, 
first  of  all,  the  best  ideas  that  human  culture  has 
formulated,  and  then  to  apply  them  to  Hfe — this  is 
Arnold's  method.  How  the  method  worked  in  the 
case  of  ideas  upon  religious  subjects  has  already  been 
suggested;  it  now  remains  to  say  a  few  words  about 
the  method  as  related  to  the  problems  of  society, 
of  education,  of  politics,  and  of  that  broad  ideal  of 
culture  for  which  Arnold  so  preeminently  stands. 
Nothing  is  more  familiar  to  his  readers  than  the  pl^sL- 
sification  of  Enghsh  society  into  Barbarians 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  273 

tines,  and  Populace.  Incidentally,  "America  is  just 
ourselves,  with  the  Barbarians  quite  left  out,  and  the 
Populace  nearly."  His  conception  of  the  Philistine, 
particularly,  is  one  of  the  most  noticeable  features 
of  his  social  philosophy.  A  few  words  about  the 
modern  history  of  this  term  may  not  be  out  of  place. 
The  biblical  Philistine  is  the  dull  and  brutish  enemy 
of  the  chosen  people,  the  foe  of  the  children  of  light. 
The  word  became  popular  in  the  slang  of  German 
students  a  hundred  years  or  more  ago,  and  was  used 
by  them  to  designate  such  people  as  tradesmen  and 
landlords  and  money-lenders  and  hard-headed,  pros- 
perous citizens — all  sorts  of  people,  in  short,  whose 
interests  were  opposed  to  those  of  the  student  class. 
Goethe  used  the  word,  in  one  of  his  early  poems, 
to  describe  the  farmer  who  sees  in  the  fresh  verdure 
of  the  springtime  fields  nothing  more  than  the  prom- 
ise of  successful  crops.  Heine  took  up  the  word 
and  made  much  of  it,  finding  it  a  convenient  epithet 
for  all  kinds  of  dull-witted  people,  impervious  to 
ideas,  and  insensible  to  the  appeal  of  any  form  of  art. 
Carlyle  brought  the  word  into  English,  explaining  it 
as  a  nickname  given  to  the  eighteenth-century  ra- 
tionahsts  of  Germany  by  the  partisans  of  the  phi- 
losophy of  idealism.  Among  later  definitions,  Leslie 
Stephen's  is  noteworthy.  He  calls  it  a  "word  which 
I  understand  properly  to  denote  indifference  to  the 
higher  intellectual  interests.  The  word  may  also  be 
defined,  however,  as  the  name  applied  by  prigs  to  the 
rest  of  their  species."    Arnold's  use  of  the  term  may 


274  ]\IATTHEW  ARNOLD 

be  illustrated  by  the  following  extracts.  After  speak- 
ing of  the  English  people  as  "of  all  people  the  most 
inaccessible  to  ideas  and  the  most  impatient  of  them," 
he  goes  on  to  say : 

"Philistia  has  come  to  be  thought  by  us  the  true  Land  of 
Promise,  and  it  is  anything  but  that;  the  born  lover  of  ideas, 
the  born  hater  of  commonplaces,  must  feel  in  this  country,  that 
the  sky  over  his  head  is  of  brass  and  iron.  The  enthusiast  for 
the  idea,  for  reason,  values  reason,  the  idea,  in  and  for  them- 
selves; he  values  them,  irrespectively  of  the  practical  conveni- 
ences which  their  triumph  may  obtain  for  him;  and  the  man 
who  regards  the  possession  of  these  practical  conveniences  as 
something  sufficient  in  itself,  something  which  compensates  for 
the  absence  or  surrender  of  the  idea,  of  reason,  is,  in  his  eyes, 
a  Philistine." 

But  "there  is  bahn  in  Philistia  as  well  as  in  Gilead," 
and  there  is  a  soul  of  goodness  in  Philistinism  itself. 

"This  soul  of  goodness  I,  who  am  often  supposed  to  be  Phi- 
listinism's mortal  enemy  merely  because  I  do  not  wish  it  to 
have  things  all  its  own  way,  cherish  as  much  as  anybody.  This 
steady-going  habit  leads  at  last,  as  I  have  said,  up  to  science, 
up  to  the  comprehension  and  interpretation  of  the  world.  .  .  . 
Doors  that  open,  windows  that  shut,  locks  that  turn,  razors 
that  shave,  coats  that  wear,  watches  that  go,  and  a  thousand 
more  such  good  things,  are  the  invention  of  the  Philistines." 

But  man  does  not  live  by  these  things  alone,  and 
Arnold's  conception  of  the  relation  between  the 
Philistine  and  the  idealist  is  beautifully  expressed 
in  his  apostrophe  to  the  University  of  Oxford. 

"Adorable  dreamer,  whose  heart  has  been  so  romantic!  who 
hast  given  thyself  so  prodigally,  given  thyself  to  sides  and  to 
heroes  not  mine,  only  never  to  the  Philistines!  home  of  lost 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  275 

causes,  and  forsaken  beliefs,  and  unpopular  names,  and  im- 
possible loyalties!  what  example  could  ever  so  inspire  us  to 
keep  down  the  Philistine  in  ourselves,  what  teacher  could  ever 
so  save  us  from  that  bondage  to  which  we  are  all  prone,  that 
bondage  wliich  Goethe,  in  his  incomparable  lines  on  the  death 
of  Schiller,  makes  it  his  friend's  highest  praise  (and  nobly  did 
Schiller  deserve  the  praise)  to  have  left  miles  out  of  sight 
behind  him;  the  bondage  of  ^Was  uns  alle  bdndigtf  Das 
Gemeine  !'  Apparitions  of  a  day,  what  is  our  puny  warfare 
against  the  Philistines,  compared  with  the  warfare  which  this 
queen  of  romance  has  been  waging  against  them  for  centuries, 
and  will  wage  after  we  are  gone?" 

Arnold  had  so  much  to  say  about  the  Philistines  be- 
cause he  felt,  as  Professor  Gates  says,  that  "society 
is  in  serious  danger  unless  men  of  this  class  can  be 
touched  with  a  sense  of  their  shortcomings ;  made 
aware  of  the  larger  values  of  life;  made  pervious  to 
ideas;  brought  to  recognise  the  importance  of  the 
things  of  the  mind  and  of  the  spirit."  The  human 
being  who  was  devoid  of  taste  in  literature  and  art, 
whose  religion  was  more  than  touched  with  vul- 
garity, "and  who  had  a  morbid  hankering  after  mar- 
riage with  his  deceased  wife's  sister,"  this  was  the 
creature  in  whom  Arnold  found  a  perpetual  griev- 
ance, and  against  whom  he  directed  the  shafts  of  his 
keenest  satire. 

Another  distinction,  almost  as  prominent  in 
Arnold's  social  philosophy  as  the  one  just  under 
consideration,  is  the  distinction  between  Hebraism 
and  Hellenism.  "The  uppermost  idea  with  Hellenism 
is  to  see  things  as  they  really  are;  the  uppermost 
idea    with    Hebraism    is    conduct    and    obedience." 


tX 


276  IVIATTHEW  ARNOi^JJ 

Arnold  found  the  English  character  heavily  charged 
with  Hebraism,  which  was  itself  the  legacy  of  that 
Puritan  movement  which  had  turned  the  key  on  the 
human  spirit  more  than  two  hundred  years  before. 
He  would  have  been  the  last  of  men  to  deny  the  virtues 
of  Puritanism,  which,  in  its  insistence  upon  the  over- 
whelming importance  of  conduct,  exalted  an  ideal 
fundamentally  the  same  as  his  own.  But  it  seemed 
to  him  that  the  Puritan  way  of  regarding  life  had 
taken  too  complete  possession  of  the  English  char- 
acter, and  that  the  service  which  he  could  best  render 
would  be  to  present  the  forgotten  claim  of  a  more 
gracious  and  clear-sighted  view. 

"To  get  rid  of  one's  ignorance,  to  see  things  as  they  are,  and 
by  seeing  tliem  as  they  are  to  see  them  in  their  beauty,  is  the 
simple  and  attractive  ideal  which  Hellenism  holds  out  before 
human  nature ;  and  from  the  simplicity  and  charm  of  this  ideal, 
Hellenism,  and  human  life  in  the  hands  of  Hellenism,  is  in- 
vested with  a  kind  of  aerial  ease,  clearness,  and  radiancy;  they 
are  full  of  what  we  call  sweetness  and  light.  .  .  .  The  space 
which  sin  fills  in  Hebraism,  as  compared  with  Hellenism,  is 
indeed  prodigious.  This  obstacle  to  perfection  fills  the  whole 
scene,  and  perfection  appears  remote  and  rising  away  from 
earth,  in  the  background.  .  .  .  The  discipline  of  the  Old 
Testament  may  be  summed  up  as  a  discipline  teaching  us  to 
abhor  and  flee  from  sin;  the  discipline  of  the  New  Testament, 
as  a  discipline  teaching  us  to  die  to  it.  As  Hellenism  speaks 
of  thinking  clearly,  seeing  things  in  their  essence  and  beauty, 
as  a  grand  and  precious  feat  for  man  to  achieve,  so  Hebraism 
speaks  of  becoming  conscious  of  sin,  of  awakening  to  a  sense  of 
sin,  as  a  feat  of  this  kind.  It  is  obvious  to  what  wide  diverg- 
ence these  difl'ering  tendencies,  actively  followed,  must  lead. 
As  one  passes  and  repasses  from  Hellenism  to  Hebraism,  from 
Plato  to  St.  Paul,  one  feels  inclined  to  rub  one's  eyes  and  ask 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  277 

one's  self  whether  man  is  indeed  a  gentle  and  simple  being, 
showing  the  traces  of  a  noble  and  divine  nature;  or  an  unhappy- 
chained  captive,  labouring  with  groanings  that  cannot  be  uttered 
to  free  himself  from  the  body  of  this  death." 

In  the  issue  thus  drawn,  Arnold .  stood,  of  course, 
on  the  side  of  Hellenism,  not,  as  has  already  been  said, 
because  he  deemed  it  to  represent  the  most  important 
aspect  of  the  spiritual  life,  but  rather  because  it 
did  not  seem  to  him  to  have  had  a  fair  show  in  mod- 
ern England.  Its  touch  was  needed  to  soften  the 
asperity  of  the  English  moral  temper;  its  glasses 
were  needed  to  widen  the  Enghsh  intellectual  out- 
look. 

There  is  one  aspect  of  Arnold's  work  which  has 
not  usually  received  the  attention  it  deserves,  and 
which  I  would  be  unwilling  to  neglect  even  in  so 
summary  an  account  of  his  leading  ideas  as  that 
now  attempted.  The  fact  is  apt  to  be  forgotten  that 
during  a  long  period  of  the  best  years  of  his  life 
his  literary  pursuits  constituted  an  avocation,  and 
that  his  real  work  was  the  very  practical  one  of  in- 
specting schools  and  marking  examination  papers. 
In  his  capacity  as  an  officer  of  public  education  he 
prepared  many  reports  of  his  work,  and  also  wrote 
those  volumes  upon  the  schools  of  France  and  Ger- 
many which  no  one  engaged  in  the  work  of  education 
can  afford  to  neglect.  These  educational  writings 
have  something  less  than  the  full  charm  of  his  man- 
ner at  its  best,  but  they  are  no  less  stimulating  in 
their  influence  than  his  more  popular  books,  and  no 


278  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

less  weighty  in  their  judgments.  It  is  so  rare  a 
thing  for  an  inteUigence  of  the  first  order  to  be 
appHed  to  the  technical  questions  of  teaching  that 
Arnold's  writings  in  this  department  have  a  value 
that  is  well-nigh  unique.  That  value  is  as  great 
now  as  it  ever  was,  for  Arnold's  discussion  of  edu- 
cational questions,  however  closely  concerned  with 
the  matter  immediately  in  hand,  never  loses  sight  of 
the  permanent  principles  that  underlie  all  sound 
educational  work.  These  writings  have  particular 
value  in  our  own  time,  for  they  serve  as  a  corrective 
to  what  must  be  regarded  as  the  two  most  unfortu- 
nate tendencies  in  the  current  educational  movement 
— the  tendency  to  place  faith  in  machinery,  and  the 
tendency  to  demand  for  subjects  of  secondary  im- 
portance a  recognition  equal  to  that  given  to  the 
humanities.  It  is  hardly  necessary  to  say  that  the 
weight  of  Arnold's  influence  was  always  thrown 
against  machinery  and  in  favour  of  the  humanities. 
A  passage  in  one  of  his  essays  on  rehgious  subjects 
sets  forth  his  essential  ideal  of  education  in  very 
clear  terms.  I  quote  the  passage,  only  substituting 
the  word  "humanities"  for  the  word  "religion." 

"Undoubtedly  there  are  times  when  a  reaction  sets  in,  when  an 
interest  in  the  processes  of  productive  industry,  in  physical 
science  and  the  practical  arts,  is  called  an  interest  in  things, 
and  an  interest  in  the  humanities  is  called  an  interest  in  words. 
People  really  do  seem  to  imagine  that  in  seeing  and  learning 
how  buttons  are  made,  or  j^cipi^r  mdch^i  they  shall  find  some 
new  and  untried  vital  resource;  that  our  prospects  from  this 
sort  of  study  have  something  peculiarly  hopeful  and  animating 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  279 

about  them;  and  that  the  positive  and  practical  thing  to  do  is 
to  give  up  the  humanities  and  turn  to  them." 

Arnold's  story  of  the  schoolboy  who  was  required  to 
paraphrase  Macbeth's  "Canst  thou  not  minister  to 
a  mind  diseased?"  and  wrote,  "Can  you  not  wait  upon 
the  lunatic?"  is  known  to  most  readers,  and  affords 
a  typical  illustration  of  the  state  of  mind  which  our 
mechanical  education  is  apt  to  produce.  It  was 
against  the  tendency  to  produce  such  results  as  this 
that  Arnold  threw  the  entire  weight  of  his  influ- 
ence. The  little  book  of  selections  from  the  prophet 
Isaiah  which  he  prepared  for  school  use  is  unknown 
to  the  great  body  of  his  readers,  but  it  gives  us  in 
a  preface  some  of  his  ripest  educational  wisdom. 

"Why  is  this  attempt  made?  It  is  made  because  of  my  con- 
viction of  the  immense  importance  in  education  of  what  is 
called  letters;  of  the  side  which  engages  our  feehngs  and 
imagination.  Science,  the  side  which  engages  our  faculty  of 
exact  knowledge,  may  have  been  too  much  neglected;  more 
particularly  this  may  have  been  so  as  regards  our  knowledge 
of  nature.  This  is  probably  true  of  our  secondary  schools  and 
universities.  But  on  our  schools  for  the  people  .  .  .  the  power 
of  letters  has  hardly  been  brought  to  bear  at  all;  certainly  it 
has  not  been  brought  to  bear  in  excess,  as  compared  with  the 
power  of  the  natural  sciences.  .  .  .  For  any  one  who  believes 
in  the  civilising  power  of  letters,  and  often  talks  of  this  belief, 
to  think  that  he  has  for  more  than  twenty  years  got  his  living 
by  inspecting  schools  for  the  people,  has  gone  in  and  out 
among  them,  has  seen  that  the  power  of  letters  never  reaches 
them  at  all,  and  that  the  whole  study  of  letters  is  thereby 
discredited,  and  its  power  called  in  question,  and  yet  has  at- 
tempted nothing  to  remedy  this  state  of  things,  cannot  but  be 
vexing  and  disquieting.  He  may  truly  say,  like  the  Israel  of 
the   prophet,   'We  have  not   wrought   any   deliverance   in  the 


«80  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

earth!'  and  he  may  well  desire  to  do  something  to  pay  his 
debt  to  popular  education  before  he  finally  departs,  and  to 
serve  it,  if  he  can,  in  that  point  where  its  need  is  sorest,  where 
he  has  always  said  its  need  was  sorest,  and  where,  nevertheless, 
it  is  as  sore  still  as  when  he  began  saying  this  twenty  years 
ago." 

With  all  the  progress  that  has  been  made  in  public 
education  since  the  above  words  were  written,  it  is 
to  be  feared  that  the  need  for  such  words  is  still 
almost  as  great  as  it  was  twenty  or  thirty  years 
ago. 

I  should  like  to  say  something  of  Arnold  as  a  critic 
of  current  politics,  for  in  this  respect  full  justice  has 
never  been  done  him,  but  the  limitations  of  my  space 
forbid.  Even  of  Arnold  as  a  critic  of  literature, 
there  is  room  for  but  a  few  words.  Concerning  the 
general  sanity  and  acuteness  of  his  literary  judg- 
ments it  is  not  easy  to  speak  in  terms  of  praise  suffi- 
ciently high.  It  is  the  simple  truth  to  say  that  he 
was  the  greatest  English  critic  of  his  time.  And  yet, 
for  all  his  balance  and  insight,  he  occasionally  gave 
utterance  to  opinions  so  perverse  and  exasperating 
that  they  produce  a  feeling  of  blank  amazement. 
When  he  tells  us,  for  example,  that  Shelley's  prose  is 
better  than  his  poetry,  we  can  only  say  with  Swin- 
burne that  it  would  not  take  many  such  dicta  to  ruin 
the  reputation  of  any  critic,  however  eminent.  But 
if  I  have  taken  occasion  to  dissent,  with  all  th%em- 
phasis  at  my  command,  from  certain  of  Arnold's 
vagaries,  I  feel  bound  to  add  a  tribute  of  the  deepest 
gratitude  to  the  critic  who  has,  on  the  whole,  done 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  281 

more  than  any  of  his  contemporaries  to  aid  men  in 
clear  thinking  and  right  feeling  about  literature. 
His  instinct  in  such  matters  was  nearly  always  sure, 
and  his  guidance  is  nearly  always  safe.  As  far  as  it 
is  possible  to  take  any  general  exception  to  his 
method,  it  must  be  based  upon  the  fact  that  he  was, 
in  Mr.  Harrison's  phrase  of  which  Arnold  made 
such  humorous  use,  "without  a  philosophy  based 
on  interdependent,  subordinate,  and  coherent  princi- 
ples." He  had,  in  fact,  more  of  such  a  philosophy 
than  he  was  wiUing  to  admit,  but  there  is  still  some 
degree  of  justice  in  the  charge  that  his  criticism 
really  suffered  from  this  defect.  Professor  Gates 
puts  the  matter  fairly  enough  when  he  says: 

"As  we  read  his  essays  we  have  no  sense  of  making  definite 
progress  in  the  comprehension  of  literature  as  an  art  among 
arts,  as  well  as  in  the  appreciation  of  an  individual  author  or 
poem.  We  are  not  being  intellectually  oriented  as  we  are  in 
reading  the  most  stimulating  critical  work;  we  are  not  getting 
an  ever  surer  sense  of  the  points  of  the  compass.  Essays,  to 
have  this  orienting  power,  need  not  be  continually  prating  of 
theories  and  laws;  they  need  not  be  rabidly  scientific  in  phrase 
or  in  method.  But  they  must  issue  from  a  mind  that  has 
come  to  an  understanding  with  itself  about  the  genesis  of  art 
in  the  genius  of  the  artist;  about  the  laws  that,  when  the 
utmost  plea  has  been  made  for  freedom  and  caprice,  regulate 
artistic  production;  about  the  history  and  evolution  of  art 
forms;  and  about  the  relations  of  the  arts  among  themselves 
and  to  the  other  activities  of  life.  It  may  fairly  be  doubted  if 
Arnold  had  ever  wrought  out  for  himself  consistent  conclu- 
sions on  all  or  on  most  of  these  topics." 

Arnold  was  still  in  his  intellectual  prime  when  he 
was  taken  away  from  us  in  the  spring  of  1888.    The 


282  IMATTHEW  ARNOLD 

suddenness  of  his  death  suggests  the  closing  verses 
of  his  own  fragment  of  a  Greek  chorus. 

"But  him,  on  whom,  in  the  prime 
Of  life,  with  vigour  undimm'd. 
With  unspent  mind,  and  a  soul 
Unworn,  undebased,  undecay'd. 
Mournfully  grating,  the  gates 
Of  the  city  of  death  have  forever  closed — 
Him,  I  count  him,  well-starr'd." 

And  the  season  of  his  death  inspired  a  young  Cana- 
dian poet,  filled  with  gratitude  for  Arnold's  influence 
and  reverence  for  his  memory,  to  so  lofty  a  strain  of 
elegiac  song  that  Mr.  Carman's  "Death  in  April" 
can  hardly  fail  to  take  high  rank  among  the  finer 
threnodies  of  modern  poetry.  It  is  not  far  from 
being  a  match  to  Arnold's  own  "Thyrsis,"  upon 
Arnold's  own  o-i'ound. 


to 


"O  mother  April,  mother  of  all  dreams. 

Child  of  remembrance,  mother  of  regret. 
Inheritor  of  silence  and  desire. 
Who  dost  revisit  now  forsaken  streams. 

Canst  thou,  their  spirit,  evermore  forget 
How  one  sweet  touch  of  immemorial  fire 

Erewhile  did  use  to  flush 
The  music  of  their  wells,  as  sunset  light 

Is  laid  athwart  the  springtime  with  keen  hush? 

Being  so  gracious  and  so  loved,  hast  thou 
In  all  thy  realm  no  shelter  from  the  night 

Where  Corydon  may  keep  with  Thyrsis  now? 

"With  what  high  favour  hast  thou  rarely  given 
A  springtime  death  as  thy  bestowal  of  bliss? 
On  Avon  once  thy  tending  hands  laid  by 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  283 

The  puppet  robes,  the  curtained  scenes  were  riven. 
And  the  great  prompter  smiled  at  thy  long  kiss; 

And  Corydon's  own  master  sleeps  a-nigh 
The  stream  of  Rotha's  well. 

Where  thou  didst  bury  him,  thy  dearest  child; 
In  one  sweet  year  the  Blessed  Damozel 
Beholds  thee  bring  her  lover,  loved  by  thee, 

Outworn  for  rest,  whom  no  bright  shore  beguiled. 
To  voyage  out  across  the  grey  North  Sea; 

''And  slowly  Assabet  takes  on  her  charm. 

Since  him  she  most  did  love  thou  hast  withdrawn 

Beyond  the  wellsprings  of  perpetual  day. 

And  now  'tis  Laleham:  from  all  noise  and  harm. 
Blithe  and  boy-hearted,  whither  is  he  gone, 

(Like  them  who  fare  in  peace,  knowing  thy  sway 
Is  over  carls  and  kings, 

He  was  too  great  to  cease  to  be  a  child. 
Too  wise  to  be  content  with  childish  things,) 
Having  heard  swing  to  the  twin-leaved  doors  of  gloom, 

Pillared  with  autumn  dust  from  out  the  wild. 
And  carved  upon  with  Beauty  and  Foredoom? 

'Awhile  within  the  roaring  iron  house 

He  toiled  to  thrill  the  bitter  dark  with  cheer; 

But  ever  the  earlier  prime  wrapped  his  white  soul 

In  sure  and  flawless  welfare  of  repose. 

Kept  like  a  rare  Greek  song  through  many  a  year 

With  Chian  terebinth, — an  illumined  scroll 
No  injury  can  deface. 

And  men  will  toss  his  name  from  sea  to  sea 
Along  the  wintry  dusk  a  little  space. 
Till  thou  return  with  flight  of  swallow  and  sun 

To  weave  for  us  the  rain's  hoar  tracery. 
With  blossom  and  dream  unravelled  and  undone." 


Dante  Sabrtel  iRoeeetti 

In  the  history  of  nineteenth-century  Enghsh 
poetry,  the  year  1850  is  memorable  as  the  date  of 
Wordsworth's  death,  and  of  Tennyson's  assumption 
of  the  official  laurel.  Save  for  the  verse  of  Tenny- 
son (since  Browning's  vogue  had  hardly  got  be- 
yond the  confines  of  a  coterie),  there  seemed  to  be 
no  considerable  poetic  force  at  work  in  our  literature. 
The  earlier  impulse  had  become  spent;  the  poets  of 
the  Revolution  had  done  their  work  and  had  passed 
away.  Of  that  group  of  singers  Landor  alone  was 
left,  and  his  voice  had  never  reached  the  multitude. 
The  Revolution  itself,  as  an  influence  upon  Eng- 
lish thought,  had  become  a  memory  "of  old,  unhappy, 
far-off  things,"  and  had  lost  all  power  of  inspira- 
tion for  the  present  moment.  The  Romantic  move- 
ment, also,  had  done  its  best  and  its  worst,  had  tri- 
umphed over  tradition,  had  enlarged  the  emotional 
capacities  of  readers,  but  had  ceased  to  be  a  dominant 
and  controlling  force.  We  have  seen  that  there  was 
no  lack  of  romantic  colouring  in  the  poetry  of  Tenny- 
son and  Browning  and  Arnold,  but  we  have  seen  also 
that  these  men  had  qualities  in  which  their  prede- 
cessors were  lacking — a  more  definite  vision  and  a 
more  delicate  naturalism,  a  more  introspective  turn 
and  a  more  exact  psychological  analysis.     In  the 

284 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  285 

year  1850,  there  was  only  one  star  of  the  first  mag- 
nitude plainly  visible  in  the  heavens,  and  the  hopes 
of  English  poetry  seemed  bound  up  in  the  career  of 
a  solitary  writer.  We  have  seen  how  to  the  single 
star  of  Tennyson's  genius  there  were  added,  as  the 
skies  cleared,  the  stars  that  represented  the  genius 
of  Browning  and  of  Arnold;  our  remaining  task  is 
to  record  the  appearance,  and  to  indicate  the  influ- 
ence, of  the  triple  constellation  that  represents  the 
genius  of  Rossetti,  Morris,  and  Swinburne.  The 
last  half  of  the  nineteenth  century  gave  these  three 
names  to  English  poetry,  and  Time  has  brought  few 
gifts  equally  precious  to  our  race.  In  the  weight 
and  beauty  of  its  poetic  achievement,  the  second  half 
of  the  century  need  not  fear  comparison  with  the 
first;  to  a  discerning  observer,  in  the  year  1820,  the 
six  great  poets  then  living  may  well  have  seemed 
to  constitute  a  galaxy  of  luminaries  not  likely  again 
to  be  equalled,  but  an  observer  in  the  year  1870, 
just  half  a  hundred  years  later,  was  privileged  to 
behold  in  the  heavens  a  cluster  of  six  stars  no  less 
brilliant  and  far-shining.  There  are  three  Ages 
of  Gold  in  the  history  of  English  poetry,  and  in 
one  of  the  three  it  has  been  our  own  good  fortune 
to  live. 

If  we  place  our  hypothetical  observer  in  the  year 
1850,  and  attribute  to  him  unusual  powers  of  dis- 
cernment, we  must  think  of  him  as  regarding  with 
curious  interest,  and  even  with  excited  hopefulness, 
an    obscure    and    short-lived    periodical    which    ap- 


286  DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

peared  in  that  year.  It  was  entitled  The  Germ,  and 
four  numbers  were  published  between  January  and 
April.  The  last  two  numbers  appeared  with  the 
special  title  Art  and  Poetry.  It  was  a  forlorn 
little  magazine,  and  only  a  few  hundred  copies  of 
each  number  were  printed,  but  it  marked  the  begin- 
ning of  the  most  distinctive  development  that  has 
been  made  in  English  poetry  during  the  last  fifty 
years.  "So  that  never  was  periodical  better  named," 
says  Mr.  Gosse,  "than  The  Germ,  the  seed  which  put 
forth  two  cotyledons,  and  then  called  itself  Art  and 
Poetry:  and  put  forth  two  more  little  leaves,  and  then 
seemed  to  die."  Among  the  names  of  the  contributors 
were  those  of  Thomas  Woolner,  Ford  Madox  Brown, 
William  Bell  Scott,  and  Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti.  One 
illustration  went  with  each  number,  and  the  first 
of  the  four  was  signed  William  Holman  Hunt.  Chris- 
tina Rossetti,  writing  over  the  pseudonym  of  "Ellen 
Alle3ni,"  contributed  a  number  of  poems,  and  there 
were  three  pieces  by  Coventry  Patmore,  who  wrote 
over  no  signature  at  all.  These  names  did  not  mean 
much  in  1850,  but  the  world  was  to  hear  a  great  deal 
of  them  during  the  next  quarter  of  a  century.  Two 
3^ears  before  the  publication  of  The  Germ,  a  group  of 
seven  young  men,  five  of  whom  were  painters,  had 
banded  themselves  together  for  the  purpose  of  in- 
augurating a  new  movement  in  art.  It  was  their 
belief  that  the  traditions  of  modem  art  were  mis- 
leading, that  conventions  had  taken  the  place  of 
truths  in  the  interpretation  of  nature,  "that  paint- 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  287 

ing  had,  therefore,  become  more  of  a  handicraft  and 
less  of  an  mspiration:  and  that  to  find  examples  of 
veracious  and  noble  workmanship  it  was  necessary  to 
go  back  to  the  men  who  were  the  immediate  prede- 
cessors of  Raphael,  and  whose  work  remained  as  the 
precious  memorial  of  a  time  when  art  had  not  ceased 
to  be  simple,  sincere,  and  religious."  This  was  the 
famous  "Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood,  familiarly 
known  to  the  initiated  as  the  P.  R.  B.  The  name  was 
not  altogether  fortunate,  but  the  little  band  of 
workers  for  whom  it  stood,  although  their  activities 
afterwards  diverged  in  many  directions  from  their 
early  simple  aim,  were  unable  to  shake  it  off  after 
it  had  once  become  familiar  to  the  public.  As  Pre- 
Raphaelites  they  were  forced  to  fight  their  battle 
against  adverse  criticism,  as  Pre-Raphaelites  they 
found  an  eloquent  champion  in  John  Ruskin,  and 
Pre-Raphaelites  they  continued  to  be  dubbed  for  the 
rest  of  their  lives.  This  ascription  also  attached 
itself  to  the  men  who  afterwards  became  associated 
with  these  pioneers  in  the  public  mind,  and  particu- 
larly to  Burne-Jones,  Morris,  and  Swinburne.  As 
the  term  came  to  be  applied  to  more  and  more  men, 
and  to  a  greater  and  greater  variety  of  artistic 
products,  it  became  even  more  hopelessly  vague  in 
its  meaning  than  it  had  been  at  first,  but  it  had 
evidently  come  to  stay  in  the  jargon  of  literary  crit- 
icism, and  there  is  no  use  in  trying  to  replace  it  now. 
Nor  would  it  be  easy  to  find  any  single  term  more 
adequate  to  designate  the  complex  and  comprehensive 


288         DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

artistic  movement  which  had  its  humble  beginnings 
in  that  little  coterie  of  obscure  and  earnest  reform- 
ers. The  Germ,  it  need  hardly  be  added,  was  pro- 
jected by  these  young  men  for  the  purpose  of  explain- 
ing their  ideas  and  aspirations  more  distinctly  than 
oils  and  canvas  would  permit.  We  can  now  see  how 
much  this  movement  meant  for  English  art  and 
poetry,  and  find  in  the  history  of  that  short-lived 
Hterary  venture  one  of  the  landmarks  in  the  develop- 
ment of  modern  English  culture. 

In  position  and  significance  The  Germ  cannot 
fail  to  suggest  to  an  American  student  the 
short-lived  periodical  organ  of  the  Concord 
transcendentalists,  started  ten  years  earlier.  The 
importance  of  The  Germ  in  English  literature 
corresponds  very  closely  to  the  importance  in 
American  literature  of  The  Dial,  which  enjoyed, 
however,  four  years  of  existence  instead  of  as  many 
months.  What  Emerson  and  his  associates  were  try- 
ing to  do  in  1840  in  Concord  was  what  Rossetti  and 
his  associates  were  tr^dng  to  do  in  London  ten  years 
later:  that  is,  they  were  trying  to  direct  a  current 
of  fresh  thought  into  the  channels  of  criticism,  and 
to  call  attention  to  fresh  and  fruitful  ideals  of  art 
and  hfe.  The  difference  is,  of  course,  that  in  the 
one  case  the  predominant  motive  was  philosophical, 
and  in  the  other  aesthetic.  A  few  more  facts  and 
dates  are  needed  to  indicate  the  early  development 
of  the  Pre-Raphaelite  movement.  In  1856,  The  Germ 
found  a  successor  in  The  Oxford  and  Cambridge 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  289 

Magazine,  with  which  Morris  and  Burne-Jones  were 
associated,  and  which  was  published  for  about  a  year, 
the  cost  being  defrayed  by  Morris.  To  this  periodi- 
cal Rossetti  became  a  contributor.  In  1858,  Morris 
published  his  first  volume  of  poems.  At  about  this 
time,  also,  Swinburne  became  associated  with 
Rossetti  and  Morris  and  Burne-Jones.  His  dedica- 
tion to  the  latter  of  the  first  collection  of  "Poems  and 
Ballads"  is  a  memorable  expression  of  that  early 
friendship.  Swinburne's  first  volume,  however,  was 
"The  Queen  Mother"  and  "Rosamond"  of  1860, 
followed  a  year  later  by  Rossetti's  volume  of  transla- 
tions from  the  early  Italian  poets.  Although  both 
Morris  and  Swinburne  published  volumes  of  original 
poetry  before  Rossetti  appealed  to  the  public  in  this 
way,  Rossetti's  poems  had  for  many  years  enjoyed 
a  sort  of  esoteric  vogue,  not  only  among  readers  of 
The  Germ  and  The  Oxford  and  Cambridge  Maga- 
zine, but  also  among  others  who  had  circulated  his 
verses  in  manuscript  from  hand  to  hand.  Rossetti 
was  by  a  number  of  years  the  senior  of  both,  and 
both  looked  up  to  him  as  to  their  master  in  the 
poetic  art.  When  the  "Poems"  of  Rossetti  appeared 
in  1870,  Swinburne,  who  had  himself  taken  the  larger 
public  by  storm  four  years  earlier,  reviewed  them 
with  his  customary  generous  enthusiasm,  and  paid 
tribute  to  their  author  by  calling  him  "the  great 
artist  by  the  light  of  whose  genius  and  kindly  guid- 
ance [Morris]  put  forth  the  first  fruits  of  his  work, 
and  I  did  afterwards."    Perhaps  we  had  better  add 


290         DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

to  this  summary  of  facts  and  dates  the  statement 
that  in  1863  Morris,  in  conjunction  with  Rossetti, 
Ford  Madox  Brown,  and  Burne-Jones,  started  his 
famous  London  establishment  for  the  designing  of 
wallpaper  and  other  household  decorations. 

We  have  thus  seen  how  it  came  about  that  between 
the  year  1850,  the  year  of  The  Germy  and  the  year 
1870,  the  year  of  the  collected  volume  of  Rossetti's 
poems,  a  new  and  powerful  artistic  impulse  had  made 
itself  felt  in  England.  It  was  an  impulse  in  which 
expression,  whether  embodied  in  design  or  colour  or 
verse,  sought  to  free  itself  from  traditional  tram- 
mels, and  to  make  its  appeal  to  the  public  by  the  light 
that  shines  from  the  lamp  of  simple  truth  and  sin- 
cerity. In  its  endeavour  to  be  absolutely  sincere  this 
new  artistic  impulse  went  to  the  extreme  of  ndivetiy 
and,  in  its  recourse  to  the  forms  and  moods  of  primi- 
tive and  unsophisticated  art,  even  earned  for  itself, 
and  possibly  deserved,  the  charge  of  affectation.  Let 
us  listen  a  moment  to  its  form  of  expression  as  ex- 
emplified by  a  few  typical  pasages.  In  "The  Blessed 
Damozel,"  for  example,  there  are  such  stanzas  as  this : 

**We  two  will  lie  i'  the  shadow  of 
That  living  mystic  tree 
Within  whose  secret  gro%vth  the  Dove 

Is  sometimes  felt  to  be. 
While  every  leaf  that  his  plumes  touch 
Saith  His  Name  audibly." 

In  Morris's  first  volume  we  read  of  such  things  as 
this: 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  291 

"There  was  a  lady  lived  in  a  hall, 
Large  in  the  eyes,  and  slim  and  tall; 
And  ever  she  sung  from  noon  to  noon. 
Two  red  roses  across  the  moon.'' 

And  in  the  "Poems  and  Ballads"  of  Swinburne,  King 
David  in  the  miracle-play  is  given  such  speech  as 
this: 

"Lord  God,  alas,  what  shall  I  sain? 

Lo,  thou  art  as  an  hundred  men 

Both  to  break  and  build  again: 

The  wild  waj's  thou  makest  plain, 

Thine  hands  hold  the  hail  and  rain. 

And  thy  fingers  both  grape  and  grain; 

Of  their  largess  we  be  all  well  fain. 
And  of  their  great  pity: 

The  sun  thou  madest  of  good  gold, 

Of  clean  silver  the  moon  cold. 

All  the  great  stars  thou  hast  told 

As  thy  cattle  in  thy  fold 

Every  one  by  his  name  of  old; 

Wind  and  water  thou  hast  in  hold. 
Both  the  land  and  the  long  sea." 

These  echoes  of  religious  mysticism,  of  old-time  bal- 
ladry, of  the  drama  in  its  rude  beginnings,  carry  us 
far  back  in  thought,  back  to  a  period  when  art 
had  not  grown  conscious  of  itself,  back,  in  short,  to 
the  times  and  ideals  of  medieval  Europe.  Sympathy 
with_ the  mediaeval  mind  and  temper  is  the"prevailing 
note  of  all  this  work,  which  was  never  more  happily 
characterised — tharfwhen  Mr ."Kf edman  called  it 
stained-glass  poetry.  With  the  manifestations  of 
this  artistic  spirit  in  other  directions  than  in  that 


292  DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

of  literary  activity  we  are  not  now  concerned,  but  it 
must  be  remembered  all  the  while  that  the  impulse 
which  gave  us  this  early  work  in  verse  of  our  three 
poets  was  the  same  as  the  impulse  which  produced  the 
paintings  of  Rossetti  and  Holman  Hunt  and  Burne- 
Jones,  which  produced  the  wallpapers  and  the  tapes- 
tries of  Morris,  not  to  mention  his  Kelmscott  books 
and  his  translations  of  Icelandic  sagas.  "The 
Blessed  Damozel"  in  The  Germ  of  1850,  "The  Burden 
of  Nineveh"  in  The  Oxford  and  Cambridge  Maga- 
zine of  1856,  Morris's  "The  Defence  of  Guenevere 
and  Other  Poems"  published  in  1858,  Swinburne's 
earlier  poetic  dramas  dated  from  1860  to  1865  and 
his  "Poems  and  Ballads"  dated  1866,  and,  fmally, 
Rossetti's  "Poems"  of  1870, — these  are  the  milestones 
in  the  history  of  the  one  important  new  departure 
that  has  taken  place  in  the  English  poetry  of  the 
last  fifty  years.  In  1850,  Tennyson  was  not  merely 
supreme,  he  was  practically  alone  among  English 
poets.  Browning  had  not  been  discovered  by  the 
larger  public,  and  Arnold  had  only  just  begun  to 
write.  In  1860,  matters  did  not  stand  very  differ- 
ently, although  Browning's  "Men  and  Women"  had 
won  for  him  some  measure  of  his  long-delayed  fame, 
and  Arnold's  poems  had  found  readers  in  increasing 
numbers.  But  in  1870,  the  poet  of  "The  Earthly 
Paradise"  and  the  poet  of  "Atalanta"  and  of  the 
"Poems  and  Ballads"  had  both  won  resounding  ap- 
plause, and  the  poems  of  Rossetti,  published  in  that 
year,  found  an  eager  audience  awaiting  them.    Dur- 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  293 

ing  the  next  twelve  years  England  could  boast  the 
possession  of  no  less  than  six  living  poets  of  the 
first  order,  a  condition  only  to  be  paralleled  by  the 
second  decade  of  the  century,  when  the  poets  con- 
sidered in  the  first  six  chapters  of  this  book  were  all 
actively  at  work,  or  by  the  glorious  period  of  the 
Elizabethans.  Five  out  of  the  six  were  taken  from 
us  during  a  period  of  about  fifteen  years,  and  we 
entered  upon  the  twentieth  century  with  only  one 
great  living  poet  to  represent  our  literature  in  its 
highest  reach.  As  we  have  seen,  there  is  a  marked 
distinction  between  the  two  groups  of  three  poets 
each  into  which  the  larger  group  of  six  divides. 
Browning,  Tennyson,  and  Arnold,  on  the  whole,  made 
no  such  departure  from  tradition  as  was  made  by 
Rossetti,  Morris,  and  Swinburne.  The  first  three 
were  conventional  poets  from  the  beginning;  each 
had  his  distinctive  individual  temperament,  it  is  true, 
but  each  carried  on  the  current  of  romantic  thought 
and  emotion  as  its  course  had  been  shaped  by  the 
influences  of  the  first  half  of  the  century.  But 
Rossetti,  Morris,  and  Swinburne,  instead  of  plunging 
into  the  stream  at  the  start,  brought  to  it  new  tribu- 
taries from  strange  springs  of  inspiration.  Their 
waters  became  mingled  with  the  main  current  after  a 
time,  or,  to  drop  the  metaphor,  they  came  to  write 
much  more  nearly  in  the  conventional  manner  than 
they  had  written  at  first.  In  other  words,  the  two 
groups  of  poets  were  much  farther  apart  in  their 
beginnings  than  in  their  later  developments. 


294  DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

The  story  of  Rossetti's  famous  first  volume  is  one 
of  the  most  familiar  in  our  modern  literary  annals; 
it  belongs  to  what  may  be  called  the  pathetic  history 
of  literature.  Rossetti  shrank  from  the  pubhcation 
of  his  poems  as  he  shrank  from  the  exhibition  of 
his  pictures,  and,  although  repeatedly  urged  to 
give  them  to  the  world,  was  reluctant  to  bestow  upon 
them  that  sort  of  publicity.  When  his  wife  died  in 
1862,  his  grief  was  such  that  he  thought  to  pay  a 
tribute  to  her  memory  by  placing  in  her  grave  the 
manuscript  of  the  poems.  But  the  friends  who  had 
read  them,  and  who  knew  that  they  must  become  a 
permanent  part  of  English  literature,  were  so  urgent 
in  their  demand  for  a  reconsideration  of  Rossetti's 
decision  that  they  finally  prevailed  upon  him  to  allow 
the  precious  manuscript  to  be  disinterred  and  put 
into  print.  One  does  not  like  to  think  of  what  would 
have  been  lost  to  us  had  the  poet  not  relented,  and  had 
all  the  marvellous  beauty  of  that  volume  remained 
buried  to  the  world.  The  volume  did  not  have  to  wait 
long  for  appreciation.  It  was  at  once  recognised  by 
all  discerning  critics  as  a  treasure-house  of  master- 
pieces, as  the  embodiment  of  a  new  and  rich  poetic 
manner.  If  its  diction  was  not  exactly  simple,  it 
answered  fully  to  the  other  requirements  of  Milton's 
phrase,  being  both  sensuous  and  passionate  in  a  de- 
gree rare  even  with  the  greatest  poets.  Swinburne 
was  one  of  the  first  to  come  forward  with  an  appre- 
ciation of  the  volume,  and  the  essay  which  he  devoted 
to  it  remains  probably   the  most   sympathetic  and 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  295 

subtle  criticism  that  it  has  ever  received.  Speaking 
of  Rossetti's  style,  he  says : 

"It  has  the  fullest  fervour  and  fluency  of  impulse,  and  the 
inapulse  is  always  towards  harmony  and  perfection.  It  has  the 
inimitable  note  of  instinct,  and  the  instinct  is  always  high  and 
right.  It  carries  weight  enough  to  overbear  the  style  of  a 
weaker  man,  but  no  weight  of  thought  can  break  it,  no  subtlety 
of  emotion  attenuate,  no  ardour  of  passion  deface.  It  can 
breathe  unvexed  in  the  finest  air  and  pass  unsinged  through  the 
keenest  fire:  it  has  all  the  grace  of  perfect  force  and  all  the 
force  of  perfect  grace." 

Browning  tells  us  of  another  painter  who  wrote  "a 
century  of  sonnets,"  which  the  world  was  never  per- 
mitted to  read.  Rossetti's  sonnets,  fortunately,  did 
not  share  the  fate  of  Raphael's,  but  rather  remain 
to  us  as  do  the  sonnets  of  Michelangelo,  in  eloquent 
testimony  of  the  fact  that  it  is  possible  for  an 
artist  to  achieve  supreme  excellence  in  more  than 
one  form  of  art.  The  sonnet-sequence  called  "The 
House  of  Life,"  which  was  not  completed  until  the 
publication  of  Rossetti's  second  volume  the  year  be- 
fore his  death,  but  of  which  the  greater  part  ap- 
peared in  his  first  volume,  is  so  rich  in  its  varied 
beauty  that  we  can  compare  it  only  with  the  great- 
est work  of  its  kind,  with  the  sonnets  of  Shakespeare 
and  of  Milton,  of  Wordsworth  and  of  Keats.  Swin- 
burne says  of  this  work  that 

"there  Is  not  a  jewel  but  it  fits,  not  a  beauty  but  it  subserves  an 
end.  There  seems  no  story  in  this  sequence  of  sonnets,  yet  they 
hold  in  them  all  the  action  and  passion  of  a  spiritual  history 
with  tragic  stages  and  elegiac  pauses  and  lyric  motions  of  the 


296         DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

living  soul.  .  .  .  All  passion  and  regret  and  strenuous  hope 
and  fiery  contemplation,  all  beauty  and  glory  of  thought  and 
vision,  are  built  into  this  golden  house  where  the  life  that  reigns 
is  love;  the  very  face  of  sorrow  is  not  cold  or  withered,  but  has 
the  breath  of  heaven  between  its  fresh  live  lips  and  the  light 
of  pure  sweet  blood  in  its  cheeks;  there  is  a  glow  of  summer 
on  the  red  leaves  of  its  regrets  and  the  starry  frost-flakes  of 
its  tears." 

These  sonnets  have  often  been  charged  with  obscurity, 
but  the  charge  means  even  less  with  Rossetti  than  it 
does  with  Browning.  The  concentration  of  their 
thought  is  so  great  that  frequently  its  meaning  does 
not  become  apparent  until  a  sonnet  has  been  read 
several  times,  but  when  the  meaning  is  once  fully 
grasped,  there  remains  no  doubt  that  the  vision  of 
the  poet  was  absolutely  clear.  Many  of  them,  in- 
deed, one  would  not  think  of  reading  aloud,  any  more 
than  one  would  think  of  reading  "Sordello"  aloud, 
because  their  thought  flies  so  swiftly  from  image 
to  image,  and  because  their  emotion  is  so  intense 
that  it  must  be  lingered  over  to  become  fully  im- 
parted to  the  listener.  But  one  need  have  no  hesi- 
tation about  reading  aloud  such  a  sonnet  as  "Hoarded 
Joy7'  which  is  about  as  nearly  faultless  in  its  beauty 
as  a  sonnet  can  be. 

"I  said:  'Nay,  pluck  not,-'let  the  first  fruit  be: 
Even  as  thou  sayest,  it  is  sweet  and  red. 
But  let  it  ripen  still.     The  tree's  bent  head 
Sees  in  the  stream  its  own  fecundity 
And  bides  the  day  of  fulness.     Shall  not  we 
At  the  sun's  hour  that  day  possess  the  shade. 
And  claim  our  fruit  before  its  ripeness  fade. 
And  eat  it  from  the  branch  and  praise  the  tree?' 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  297 

I  say :  *Alas !  our  fruit  hath  wooed  the  sun 
Too  long, — 'tis  fallen  and  floats  down  the  stream. 

Lo,  the  last  clusters!     Pluck  them  every  one. 
And  let  us  sup  with  summer;  ere  the  gleam 

Of  autumn  set  the  year's  pent  sorrow  free, 

And  the  woods  wail  like  echoes  from  the  sea." 

The  distinction  between  the  sensuous  and  the 
sensual,  between  the  legitimate  and  the  illegitimate 
use  of  love  as  a  poetic  motive,  is  perfectly  illustrated 
by  this  sequence  of  sonnets,  although  it  is  a  dis- 
tinction that  some  of  Rossetti's  critics  have  failed 
to  understand.  The  Muse  of  his  inspiration  is  like 
the  woman  of  his  own  divine  song, 

"Whose  speech  Truth  knows  not  from  her  thought. 
Nor  Love  her  body  from  her  soul." 

Noteworthy  in  bad  eminence  among  the  purblind  per- 
sons who  were  incapable  of  grasping  this  distinction, 
or  of  realising  how  essentially  pure  and  spiptufl] 
was  the  cf^nrpptinn  nf  Invp  ^s  embodied  JnJ^TheHouse 
of  Life,"  was  the  author  of  a  pseudonymous  article 
published  in  one  of  the  English  reviews  soon  after 
the  appearance  of  Rossetti's  volume.  This  article 
was  entitled  "The  Fleshly  School  of  Poetry,"  and  it 
soon  transpired  that  Robert  Buchanan  was  the 
writer.  It  was  a  foul  piece  of  work,  and  Rossetti 
felt  keenly  the  aspersions  which  it  cast  upon  his 
ideas  and  his  motives.  Even  the  writer  came  in  time 
to  get  some  inkling  of  the  peculiar  grossness  of  his 
offence,  to  regret  what  he  had  said,  and  to  offer 


298         DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

what  apology  he  might.  But  the  mischief  was  done, 
a  mischief  far  greater  than  was  done  to  Keats  by 
the  attacks  of  the  reviewers,  for  Rossetti's  nature 
was  almost  morbidly  sensitive,  and  he  brooded  over 
the  matter  for  years  afterwards.  The  castigation 
administered  to  the  offender  by  Swinburne,  in  the 
Kttle  book  entitled  "Under  the  Microscope,"  was  so 
thorough  and  severe  that  it  disposed  of  the  reviler 
once  for  all,  and  makes  any  other  reprobation  seem 
both  mild  and  superfluous.  Frederic  Myers  struck 
the  just  note  of  criticism  when  he  wrote: 

"Enough,  perhaps,  has  been  said  to  indicate  not  only  how 
superficial  is  the  view  which  represents  Rossetti  as  a  dangerous 
sensualist,  but  also  how  inadequately  we  shall  understand  him 
if  we  think  to  find  in  him  only  the  commonplaces  of  passion 
dressed  out  in  fantastic  language  and  Italianised  allegory.  .  .  . 
If  we  contrast  aestheticism  with  pure  hedonism — the  pursuit  of 
pleasure  through  art  with  the  pursuit  of  pleasure  simply  as 
pleasure — the  one  has  a  tendency  to  quicken  and  exalt,  as  the 
other  to  deaden  and  vulgarise,  the  emotions  and  appetencies  of 
man.  If  only  the  artist  can  keep  clear  of  the  sensual  selfish- 
ness which  ^nll,  in  its  turn,  degrade  the  art  which  yields  to  it; 
if  only  he  can  worship  beauty  with  a  strong  and  single  heart, 
his  emotional  nature  will  acquire  a  grace  and  elevation  which 
are  not,  indeed,  identical  with  the  elevation  of  virtue,  the  grace 
of  holiness,  but  which  are,  none  the  less,  a  priceless  enrichment 
of  the  complex  life  of  man.  .  .  .  Yet  who  can  read  'The 
House  of  Life'  and  not  feel  that  the  poet  has  known  Love  as 
Love  can  be — not  an  enjoyment  only  or  a  triumph,  but  a 
worship  and  a  regeneration;  Love  not  fleeting  or  changeful, 
but  'Far  above  all  passionate  winds  of  welcome  and  farewell:' 
Love  oflFering  to  the  soul  no  mere  excitation  and  by-play,  but 
*a  heavenly  solstice  hushed  and  halcyon;'  Love  whose  'hours 
elect  in  choral  consonancy'  bear  with  them  nothing  that  is  vain 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  299 

or  vulgar,  common  or  unclean.  He  must  have  felt  as  no  pass- 
ing tragedy  the  long  ache  of  parted  pain,  'the  ground-whirl  of 
the  perished  leaves  of  hope,'  'the  sunset's  desolate  disarray,' 
the  fruitless  striving  'to  wrest  a  bond  from  night's  inveteracy,' 
to  behold  'for  once,  for  once  alone,'  the  unforgotten  eyes  re- 
risen  from  the  dark  of  death." 


A  considerable  part  of  Rossetti's  most  character- 
istic work  is  so  purely  aesthetic  in  its  appeal  that  it 
does  not  come  within  the  scope  of  the  present  dis- 
cussion. I  must  be  contented  with  mere  mention 
of  the  whole  group  of  tragic  ballads,  of  the  sonnets 
written  for  pictures,  and  the  lyrics  which  seemed 
to  endow  EngHsh  poetry  with  notes  and  harmo- 
nies before  unknown.  Even  the  dramatic  mono- 
logue, "A  Last  Confession,"  which  vies  with  Brown- 
ing upon  his  own  ground,  may  not  be  considered 
here.  A  few  words  may  be  given,  however,  to  the 
poem  "Jenny,"  the  one  poem  in  which  Rossetti  sub- 
jects a  present-day  subject  to  realistic  treatment. 
The  subject  is  a  delicate  one  to  handle,  and  the  poem 
is  one,  in  Mr.  Forman's  words,  "that  almost  all  criti- 
cism or  discussion  must  mispresent,  not  on  account  of 
any  ineffable  workmanship  such  as  may  be  found  in 
many  of  these  poems,  but  simply  because  of  the  utter 
cleanliness  and  manliness  with  which  the  matter  in 
hand  has  been  treated."  The  burden  of  the  speaker's 
reflections,  as  he  gazes  upon  this  outcast  woman 
asleep,  is  in  the  deepest  degree  impressive,  and  the 
moral  which  it  suggests  but  does  not  obtrude  is  made 
to  take  the  strongest  possible  hold  upon  us. 


300         DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

"Just  as  another  woman  sleeps! 
Enough  to  throw  one's  thoughts  in  heaps 
Of  doubt  and  horror, — what  to  say 
Or  think, — this  awful  secret  sway, 
The  potter's  power  over  the  clay! 
Of  the  same  lump  (it  has  been  said) 
For  honour  and  dishonour  made. 
Two  sister  vessels.    Here  is  one." 

And  for  grim  concentration  of  thought,  for  vivid 
presentation  of  the  appalling  problem  of  evil,  I 
would  not  know  where  to  match  the  simple  single 
line  which  is  the  poet's  sole  comment  upon  the  passage 
I  have  quoted. 

"It  makes  a  goblin  of  the  sun." 

Of  this  poem  Swinburne  says : 

"Its  plainness  of  speech  and  subject  gives  it  power  to  touch 
the  heights  and  sound  the  depths  of  tragic  thought  without 
losing  the  force  of  its  hold  and  grasp  upon  the  palpable  truths 
which  men  often  seek  and  cry  out  for  in  poetry,  without  know- 
ing that  these  are  only  good  when  greatly  treated,  and  that  to 
artists  who  can  treat  them  greatly  all  times  and  all  truths  are 
equal,  and  the  present,  though  assuredly  no  worse,  yet  as- 
suredly no  better  topic  than  the  past.  .  .  .  All  the  open 
sources  of  pathetic  eflfusion  to  which  a  common  shepherd  of 
souls  would  have  led  the  flock  of  his  readers  to  drink  and  weep 
and  be  refreshed,  and  leave  the  medicinal  wellspring  of  senti- 
ment warmer  and  fuller  from  their  easy  tears,  are  here  dried 
up.  .  .  .  Without  a  taint  on  it  of  anything  coarse  or  trivial, 
without  shadow  or  suspicion  of  any  facile  or  vulgar  aim  at 
pathetic  effect  of  a  tragical  or  moral  kind,  it  cleaves  to  absolute 
fact  and  reality  closer  than  any  common  preacher  or  realist 
could  come;  no  side  of  the  study  is  thrown  out  or  thrown  back 
into  false  light  or  furtive  shadow;  but  the  purity  and  nobility 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  301 

of  its  high  and  ardent  pathos  are  qualities  of  a  moral  weight 
and  beauty  beyond  reach  of  any  rivalry." 

The  influence  of  Dante  upon  the  work  of  Rossetti 
— both  in  his  painting  and  in  his  poetry — is  so 
marked  that  it  calls  for  special  consideration.  That 
influence  could  hardly  fail  in  a  poet  of  his  tempera- 
ment, antecedents,  and  home  associations.  With 
the  whole  Rossetti  family,  Dante  was  more  than  a 
poet  among  other  poets,  he  was  rather  a^religiouy  an 
unfailing  source  of  spirituaI,jbljS.pirriitiQ»  Every 
member  of  that  family  gave  some  sort  of  testimony 
to  his  reverence  for  the  Florentine  poet  and  the 
Sacred  Song  that  bears  his  name.  The  elder  Ros- 
setti was  the  author  of  an  acute  and  learned  com- 
mentary upon  Dante,  a  commentary  rendered  some- 
what futile  by  its  insistence  upon  mystical  and  alle- 
gorical interpretations,  but  still  a  noteworthy  con- 
tribution to  the  vast  literature  of  the  subject.  Wil- 
liam Michael  Rossetti  was  one  of  the  many  English 
translators  of  the  "Inferno,"  and  was  otherwise  con- 
siderably occupied  with  studies  in  Dante.  Maria 
Francesca  Rossetti,  in  her  work  entitled  "The 
Shadow  of  Dante,"  gave  to  English  readers  one  of 
the  most  helpful  guides  for  the  understanding  of 
the  poet.  The  poems  of  Christina  Rossetti  abound 
in  echoes  from  Dante,  and  are  saturated  with  his 
spirit.  His  influence  upon  Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti 
is  shown  in  many  tributes,  both  direct  and  indirect; 
in  none,  perhaps,  more  beautifully  than  in  the  lines 
inscribed  to  the  memory  of  his  father : 


302  DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

"And  didst  thou  know  indeed,  when  at  the  font 
Together  with  thy  name  thou  gav'st  me  his, 
That  also  on  thy  son  must  Beatrice 

Decline  her  eyes  according  to  her  wont, 

Accepting  me  to  be  of  those  that  haunt 
The  vale  of  magical  dark  mysteries 
Where  to  the  hills  her  poet's  foot-track  lies 

And  wisdom's  living  fountain  to  his  chaunt 

Trembles  in  music?" 

How  Rossetti  haunted  that  "vale  of  magical  dark 
mysteries"  is  well  known.  His  first  published  book 
was  that  volume  on  "The  Early  Italian  Poets,"  with 
which  readers  are  more  familiar  under  its  later  title 
of  "Dante  and  His  Circle."  That  work,  which  in- 
cludes Rossetti's  wonderfully  poetical  and  sympa- 
thetic translation  of  "The  New  Life" — which  I  am 
sometimes  tempted  to  call  the  most  beautiful  book 
in  all  literature, — has  a  special  niche  in  the  aflPections 
of  lovers  of  Dante.  Rossetti's  translatio-^  of  the 
fragment  containing  the  episode  of  Paolo  and  Fran- 
cesca  makes  us  think  regretfully  of  what  he  might 
have  done  for  the  entire  "Divine  Comedy,"  had  he 
been  so  minded.  Such  a  translation  as  he  could  have 
made  would  have  become  one  of  the  most  imperishable 
possessions  of  English  literature;  such  a  conjunction 
of  genius  and  sympathy  between  Dante  and  an  Eng- 
lish poet  has  never  before  occurred,  and  is  never 
likely  to  occur  again.  To  the  "Vita  Nuova,"  which 
happily  he  did  translate  in  full,  Rossetti's  thoughts 
went  back  in  one  of  his  later  sonnets,  and  described 
the  influence  of  that  book  upon  his  youthful  mind. 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

"As  he  that  loves  oft  looks  on  the  dear  form 
And  guesses  how  it  grew  to  womanhood, 
And  gladly  would  have  watched  the  beauties  bud 
And  the  mild  fire  of  precious  life  wax  warm: 
So  I,  long  bound  within  the  threefold  charm 
Of  Dante's  love  sublimed  to  heavenly  mood. 
Had  marvelled,  touching  his  Beatitude, 
How  grew  such  presence  from  man's  shameful  swarm. 

At  length  within  this  book  I  found  pourtrayed 

Newborn  that  Paradisal  Love  of  his, 
And  simple  like  a  child;  with  whose  clear  aid 

I  understood.     To  such  a  child  as  this, 
Christ,  charging  well  His  chosen  ones,  forbade 

Offence:  'For  lo!  of  such  my  kingdom  is.'" 

Rossetti's  chief  personal  tribute  to  the  great  Italian 
poet  is,  of  course,  the  long  and  noble  poem,  "Dante 
at  Verona."  This  poem  appeals  to  us,  not  only  with 
the  force  of  its  author's  own  personality,  but  with  the 
superadded  weight  and  authority  of  Dante's  genius. 
Dante's  own  words  are  woven  with  happy  craft  into 
the  text,  and  fitted  to  the  metrical  scheme  without 
any  essential  alteration.  The  emotion  which  we  feel 
in  reading  is  thus  referable  to  him  who  inspired 
the  song  almost  as  much  as  to  him  who  wrote  it. 
From  an  external  point  of  view,  the  poem  is  a  chron- 
icle of  the  years  spent  by  Dante  at  the  court  of  the 
Scahgers ;  viewed  from  within,  it  is  an  effective  con- 
trast between  the  outer  life  shaped  by  environment, 
and  the  spiritual  life  fed  by  its  own  springs.  Lowell 
puts  the  contrast  in  these  words:  "Looked  at  out- 
wardly, the  life  of  Dante  seems  to  have  been  an  utter 
and  disastrous  failure.     What  its  inward  satisfac- 


304  DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

tion  must  have  been,  we,  with  the  'Paradiso'  open 
before  us,  can  form  some  faint  conception."  Ros- 
setti  puts  the  same  thought  in  this  way : 

"Follow  his   feet's  appointed  way; — 
But  little  light  we  find  that  clears 
The  darkness  of  the  exiled  years. 
Follow  his  spirit's  journey: — nay, 

What  fires  are  blent,  what  winds  are  blown 
On  paths  his  feet  may  tread  alone?" 

Yet,  he  goes  on  to  say — and  this  is  the  programme  of 

his  poem — 

"Yet  of  the  two-fold  life  he  led 

In  chaihless  thought  and  fettered  will 
Some  glimpses  reach  us, — somewhat  still 
Of  the  steep  stairs  and  bitter  bread, — 
Of  the  soul's  quest  whose  stern  avow 
For  years  had  made  him  haggard  now.'* 

One  of  the  most  famiHar  anecdotes  of  those  years 
spent  at  Verona  is  thus  turned  to  account : 

"For  a  tale  tells  that  on  his  track, 

As  through  Verona's  streets  he  went. 
This  saying  certain  women  sent: — 

*Lo,  he  that  strolls  to  Hell  and  back 
At  will !    Behold  him,  how  Hell's  reek 
Has  crisped  his  beard  and  singed  his  cheek.' 

"'Whereat'  (Boccaccio's  words)  'he  smil'd 
For  pride  in  fame.'     It  might  be  so: 
Nevertheless  we  cannot  know 
If  haply  he  were  not  beguil'd 
To  bitterer  mirth,  who  scarce  could  tell 
If  he  indeed  were  back  from  Hell." 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  306 

But  bitter  as  were  those  years  of  exile,  Dante  re- 
jected with  scorn  the  terms  offered  him  by  his  native 
city.  Rossetti's  treatment  of  this  reception  of  the 
amnesty,  proffered  upon  terms  that  were  felt  to  be 
an  intolerable  insult  by  the  indignant  soul  of  the 
poet,  is  particularly  interesting  because  of  the  man- 
ner in  which  it  makes  use — almost  without  para- 
phrase— of  the  words  contained  in  that  famous 
"Letter  to  a  Florentine  Friend,"  which  is,  perhaps, 
the  most  precious  document  of  Dante's  life  that  has 
come  down  to  us. 

"Nevertheless,  when  from  his  kin 
There  came  the  tidings  how  at  last 
In  Florence  a  decree  was  pass'd 
Whereby  all  banished  folk  might  win 
Free  pardon,  so  a  fine  were  paid 
And  act  of  public  penance  made, — 

"This  Dante  writ  in  answer  thus, 

Words  such  as  these:  'That  clearly  they 
In  Florence  must  not  have  to  say, — 
The  man  abode  aloof  from  us 
Nigh  fifteen  years,  yet  lastly  skulk'd 
Hither  to  candleshrift  and  mulct. 

"  'That  he  was  one  the  Heavens  forbid 
To  traffic  in  God's  justice  sold 
By  market-weight  of  earthly  gold, 
Or  to  bow  down  over  the  lid 
Of  steaming  censers,  and  so  be 
Made  clean  of  manhood's  obloquy. 

"  'That  since  no  gate  led,  by  God's  will. 
To  Florence,  but  the  one  whereat 
The  priests  and  money-changers  sat. 
He  still  would  wander;  for  that  still, 


306         DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

Even  though  the  body's  prison-bars. 
His  soul  possessed  the  sun  and  stars.' 

"Such  were  his  words.    It  is  indeed 
For  ever  well  our  poets  should 
Utter  good  words  and  know  them  good 
Not  through  song  only;  with  good  heed 
Lest,  having  spent  for  the  work's  sake 
Six  days,  the  man  be  left  to  make." 

The  poet  who  wrote  these  lines  has  been  accused  of 
being  without  convictions.  The  charge  does  not  need 
any  further  refutation.  It  means  merely  that  the 
poet's  convictions  are  too  broad-based  to  square 
with  the  narrow  prejudices  of  those  who  make  it — 
that  they  are  convictions  resting  upon  the  funda- 
mental rock  of  righteousness  rather  than  upon  the 
shifting  sands  of  some  accidental  ethical  system. 

Rossetti  was  not  frequently  moved  to  embody  po- 
litical passion  in  his  verse,  but  the  occasional  pieces 
which  are  inspired  by  current  events  are  sufficient 
to  reveal  the  direction  in  which  his  sympathies  lay. 
We  have  seen  how  the  Revolution  of  1848  found  in 
Arnold  at  twenty-six  a  conservative  critic,  doubtful 
of  the  real  efficacy  of  such  efforts  to  cast  off  the 
burden  of  oppression.  Rossetti,  who  was  twenty 
years  of  age  at  that  time,  hailed  the  revolutionary 
outburst  as  a  new  sunrise  of  freedom,  in  words  that 
suggest  what  Byron  or  Shelley  might  have  written. 

"God  said,  Let  there  be  light;  and  there  was  light. 
Then  heard  we  sounds  as  though  the  Earth  did  sing 
And  the  Earth's  angel  cried  upon  the  wing." 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  307 

The  funeral  of  the  Duke  of  WeUington  evoked  a 
striking  ode  from  Rossetti,  but  in  this  case  the  splen- 
dour of  Tennyson's  triumphant  paean  makes  all  other 
attempts  to  commemorate  the  occasion  seem  insig- 
nificant. The  sonnet  upon  the  death  of  Alexander 
the  Second  expresses  deep  indignation  at  the  das- 
tardly act  of  the  assassin,  made  to  seem  so  pecu- 
liarly atrocious  by  the  memory  of  what  the  Czar 
had  done  for  the  emancipation  of  his  people. 

"From  him  did  forty  million  serfs,  endow'd 
Each  with  six  feet  of  death-due  soil,  receive 
Rich  freeborn  lifelong  land,  whereon  to  sheave 
Their  country's  harvest.    These  to-day  aloud 
Demand  of  Heaven  a  father's  blood, — sore-bow'd 

With  tears  and  thrilled  with  wrath ;  who,  while  they  grieve, 
On  every  guilty  head  would  fain  achieve 
All  torment  by  his  edicts  disallow'd. 
He  stayed  the  knout's  red-ravening  fangs;  and  first 
Of  Russian  traitors,  his  own  murderers  go 
White  to  the  tomb.    While  he,— laid  foully  low 
With  limbs  red-rent,  with  festering  brain  which  erst 
Willed  kingly  freedom, — 'gainst  the  deed  accurst 
To  God  bears  witness  of  his  people's  woe." 

It  is  interesting  to  compare  this  sonnet  with  that 
written  by  Swinburne  upon  the  same  theme.  In  the 
latter  poem,  commingled  with  the  notes  of  awe  and 
pity  occasioned  by  the  murder,  there  is  another  note 
that  we  do  not  hear  in  the  former — a  note  expressive 
of  the  nemesis  that  has  attended  so  many  despots. 

"By  no  dry  death  another  king  goes  down 
The  way  of  kings." 


308  DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

It  is,  however,  in  the  sonnet  "On  Refusal  of  Aid 
between  Nations"  that  Rossetti's  poHtical  ethics 
reach  their  highest  expression.  In  this  noble  utter- 
ance not  individuals,  merely,  but  the  nations  of  the 
earth  are  brought  to  the  bar  of  a  righteous  tribunal 
and  condemned  for  their  selfish  absorption  in  their 
own   affairs. 

"Not  that  the  earth  is  changing,  O  my  God! 
Not  that  the  seasons  totter  in  their  walk, — 
Not  that  the  virulent  ill  of  act  and  talk 
Seethes  ever  as  a  wine-press  ever  trod, — 
Not  therefore  are  we  certain  that  the  rod 
"Weighs  in  thine  hand  to  smite  the  world;  though  now 
Beneath  thine  hand  so  many  nations  bow. 
So  many  kings: — not  therefore,  O  my  Gk)d! — 
But  because  Man  is  parcelled  out  in  men 
To-day;  because,  for  any  wrongful  blow 
No  man  not  stricken  asks,  'I  would  be  told 
Why  thou  dost  thus;'  but  his  heart  whispers  then 
*He  is  he,  I  am  I.'     By  this  we  know 
That  our  earth  falls  asunder,  being  old." 

Here  is  the  very  accent  of  Milton,  the  very  majesty 
of  his  stem  exaltation  of  the  immutable  moral  law. 

Among  the  poems  of  Rossetti  there  is  one  which, 
for  imaginative  power  combined  with  a  sweep  of 
historical  vision  that  is  both  retrospective  and  pro- 
phetic, occupies  a  place  by  itself.  This  is  "The 
Burden  of  Nineveh,"  that  marvellous  reflective  com- 
position inspired  by  the  chance  sight  of  an  Assyrian 
bull-god  brought  to  the  doors  of  the  British  Museum. 
When  we  recall  the  fact  that  this  poem  was  written 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  309 

at  the  age  of  twenty-three,  we  can  only  wonder  at 
the  precocity  of  the  genius  which  thus  declared  itself. 

"Within  thy  shadow,  haply,  once 
Sennacherib  has  knelt,  whose  sons 
Smote  him  between  the  altar-stones: 
Or  pale  Semiramis  her  zones 

Of  gold,  her  incense  brought  to  thee. 
In  love  for  grace,  in  war  for  aid:  .  .  . 
Ay,  and  who  else?  .  .  .  till  'neath  thy  shade 
Within  his  trenches  newly  made 
Last  year  the  Christian  knelt  and  prayed — 

Not  to  thy  strength — in  Nineveh. 

"Now,  thou  poor  god,  within  this  hall 
Where  the  blank  windows  blind  the  wall 
From  pedestal  to  pedestal. 
The  kind  of  light  shall  on  thee  fall 

Which  London  takes  the  day  to  be: 
While  school-foundations  in  the  act 
Of  holiday,  three  files  compact. 
Shall  learn  to  view  thee  as  a  fact 
Connected  with  that  zealous  tract: 
*RoME, — Babylon  and  Nineveh.' 

"Deemed  they  of  this,  those  worshippers. 
When,  in  some  mythic  chain  of  verse 
Which  man  shall  not  again  rehearse. 
The  faces  of  thy  ministers 

Yearned  pale  with  bitter  ecstasy? 
Greece,  Egypt,  Rome, — did  any  god 
Before  whose  feet  men  knelt  unshod 
Deem  that  in  this  unblest  abode 
Another  scarce  more  unknown  god 

Should  house  with  him,  from  Nineveh?" 

And    then    the    poet's    thought,    turning    from    the 
strange   extinct   civilisation   from   whose   ruins   this 


310  DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

winged  beast  had  been  disinterred,  reflects  upon  some 
future  as  remote  as  the  past  now  vividly  brought  to 
mind,  some  future  in  which  this  ancient  god,  again 
buried  beneath  the  accumulations  of  centuries,  shall 
again  be  unearthed,  and  again  set  men  to  speculate 
upon  the  faith  to  which  it  bears  witness. 

"It  may  chance  indeed  that  when 
Man's  age  is  hoary  among  men, — 
His  centuries  three-score  and  ten, — 
His  furthest  childhood  shall  seem  then 

More  clear  than  later  times  may  be: 
Who,  finding  in  this  desert  place 
This  form,  shall  hold  us  for  some  race 
That  walked  not  in  Christ's  lowly  ways 
But  bowed  its  pride  and  vowed  its  praise 

Unto  the  God  of  Nineveh." 

Then  comes  the  moral  of  it  all,  significant  and  pro- 
found : 

"The  smile  rose  first, — anon  drew  nigh 
The  thought:  .  .  .    Those  heavy  wings,  spread  high, 
So  sure  of  flight,  which  do  not  fly; 
That  set  gaze  never  on  the  sky; 

Those  scriptured  flanks  it  cannot  see; 
Its  crown,  a  brow-contracting  load; 
Its  planted  feet  which  trust  the  sod:  .  .  . 
(So  grew  the  image  as  I  trod:) 
O  Nineveh,  was  this  thy  God, — 
Thine  also,  mighty  Nineveh?" 

Fossetti's  reli odious  message  is  not  unlike  that  of 
Arnold;  it  is  a  messa,ope  r>f  tpiTipprp(l  hnppfnlness.  a 
rail  tn  ?^<;>i7p  npon  what  the  present  mom^pt  nff^r^ 
tp  li'vp  «^imp1y  Rnd  sincerely,  t"  wplrnmp  thft'T?  mp"ds 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  311 

of  aweand_reY£X£rLc:£jn  which  the  soul  feels  liftedjip, 
and  to  realise  the  utmost  possibilities  of  a  S£intiial 
development  which  holds  its  even  course  between_seflz 
supus  en j  oyment  and  rapt  conteniplationjof  Jbhe  eter- 
naL-veritieSi  He  felt  the  wonder  and  the  vastness 
of  the  u^  Verse  too  deeply  to  admit  that  its  mystery 
was  fa+  jmed  by  any  of  the  creeds,  yet  he  could  enter 
into  t'  i  spirit  of  the  most  naive  embodiments  of  reh- 
gioufc  emotion,  and  find  tender  and  wistful  music  for 
their  expression.  In  the  group  of  sonnets  entitled 
"T.hfi— Chfiice,"  written  early  in  Kfe,  the  epicurean 
ideal  is  contrasted  with  the  ascetic  ideal^Jbu^  neither^ 
hqs  powpr  \n  satisfy  tl^^  well-h^](^nced  soul. 

"Eat  thou  and  drink;  to-morrow  thou  shalt  die." 

is  too  material  a  mandate  for  the  conduct  of  life,  and 
the  alternative  mandate, 

"Watch  thou  and  pray;  to-morrow  thou  shalt  die," 

is  made  equally  inadequate  by  its  excessive  insistence 
upon  spirituality.  But  a  third  choice  remains,  and 
this  is  clearly  the  pnpf's  vpfngp  fvnnr.  tliP  ntViPr  ty^o. 

"Think  thou  and  act;  to-morrow  thou  shalt  die. 

Outstretched  in  the  sun's  warmth  upon  the  shore. 
Thou  say'st:  'Man's  measured  path  is  all  gone  o'er: 
Up  all  his  years,  steeply,  with  strain  and  sigh, 
Man  clomb  until  he  touched  the  truth,  and  I, 
Even  I,  am  he  whom  it  was  destined  for.' 
How  should  this  be  ?     Art  thou  then  so  much  more 
Than  they  who  sowed,  that  thou  shouldst  reap  thereby? 


312         DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

'Nay,  come  up  hither.    From  this  wave-washed  mound 
Unto  the  furthest  flood-brim  look  with  me; 

Then  reach  on  with  thy  thought  till  it  be  drown'd. 
Miles  and  miles  distant  though  the  last  line  be, 

And  though  thy  soul  sail  leagues  and  leagues  beyond, — 
Still,  leagues  beyond  those  leagues,  there  is  more  sea." 

Here  is  suggested  an  ideal  of  strenuous  spiritual  ac- 
tivity not  unworthy  to  be  placed  beside  the  noblest 
utterances  of  Tennyson  and  of  Arnold.  Not  to  be 
concerned  overmuch  with  vain  questionings,  but  to 
find  in  the  boundless  possibihties  of  the  visible  uni- 
verse matter  for  the  highest  aspiration  and  the  deep- 
est awe — this  is  what  Rossetti  enjoins  upon  us  in 
the  magnificent  verses  just  quoted.  In  the  poem  en- 
titled "Soothsay,"  that  "monumental  lyrical  piece," 
as  Pater  calls  it,  we  have  an  illustration  of  "the  re- 
flective force,  the  dry  reason,  always  at  work  behind 
his  imaginative  creations,"  and  at  the  same  time  a 
clear  statement  of  his  attitude  towards  the  funda- 
mental questions  which  concern  the  conduct  of  life. 

"Crave  thou  no  dower  of  earthly  things 
Unworthy  Hope's  imaginings. 
To  have  brought  true  birth  of  Song  to  be 
And  to  have  won  hearts  to  Poesy, 
Or  anywhere  in  the  sun  or  rain 
To  have  loved  and  been  beloved  again. 
Is  loftiest  reach  of  Hope's  bright  wings. 

"Let  lore  of  all  Theology 
Be  to  thy  soul  what  it  can  be: 
But  know, — the  Power  that  fashions  man 
Measured  not  out  thy  little  span 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  313 

For  thee  to  take  the  meting-rod 
In  turn,  and  so  approve  on  God 
Thy  science  of  Theometry. 

"To  God  at  best,  to  Chance  at  worst, 
Give  thanks  for  good  things,  last  as  first. 
But  windstrown  blossom  is  that  good 
Whose  apple  is  not  gratitude. 
Even  if  no  prayer  uplift  thy  face. 
Let  the  sweet  right  to  render  grace 
As  thy  soul's  cherished  child  be  nurs'd. 

"Didst  ever  say,  *Lo,  I  forget'? 
Such  thought  was  to  remember  yet. 
As  in  a  gravegarth,  count  to  see 
The  monuments  of  memory. 
Be  this  thy  soul's  appointed  scope: — 
Gaze  onward  without  claim  to  hope. 
Nor,  gazing  backward,  court  regret." 

The  death  of  Rossetti,  in  1882,  was  the  first  break 
in  the  company  of  the  greater  Victorian  poets.  His 
life  was  burned  out  by  the  very  intensity  of  his 
genius,  and  the  end  was  no  doubt  hastened  by  his 
resort  to  those  drugs  that  for  a  time  bring  respite 
for  suffering,  but  at  the  price  of  irremediable  physi- 
cal impairment.  What  his  sufferings  were  during 
those  last  secluded  years  may  be  guessed  at  from 
some  of  his  later  lyrics.  The  personal  note  is  un- 
mistakable in  such  poems  as  "The  Cloud  Confines," 
and  "Insomnia,"  and  "Spheral  Change."  Can  there 
be,  he  asks  in  one  of  them, 

"At  length  some  hard-earned  heart-won  home. 
Where, — exile  changed  for  sanctuary, — 
Our  lot  may  fill  indeed  its  sum?" 


314         DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

and  in  another  he  asks, 

"Is  there  a  home  where  heavy  earth 

Melts  to  bright  air  that  breathes  no  pain. 
Where  water  leaves  no  thirst  again 
And  springing  fire  is  Love's  new  birth?" 

At  last  the  home  of  which  he  dreamed  became  his 
possession,  and  the  poet-friend  who  was  with  him  at 
the  close  of  life  wrote  those  sonnets  on  "A  Grave  by 
the  Sea"  which  are  among  the  most  tender  of  all 
memorial  verses. 

"Last  night  Death  whispered:  'Life's  purblind  procession. 
Flickering  with  blazon  of  the  human  story — 
Time's  fen-flame  over  Death's  dark  territory — 

Will  leave  no  trail,  no  sign  of  Life's  aggression. 

Yon  moon  that  strikes  the  pane,  the  stars  in  session, 
Are  weak  as  Man  they  mock  with  fleeting  glory. 
Since  Life  is  only  death's  frail  feudatory. 

How  shall  love  hold  of  Fate  in  true  possession?' 

I  answered  thus:  *If  Friendship's  isle  of  palm 

Is  but  a  vision,  every  loveliest  leaf. 
Can  knowledge  of  its  mockery  soothe  and  calm 

This  soul  of  mine  in  this  most  fiery  grief? 

If  Love  but  holds  of  Life  through  Death  in  fief, 
What  balm  in  knowing  that  Love  is  Death's — what  balm? 

"Yes,  thus  I  boldly  answered  Death — even  I 

Who  have  for  boon — who  have  for  deathless  dower — 
Thy  love,  dear  friend,  which  broods,  a  magic  power. 
Filling  with  music  earth  and  sea  and  sky: 
'O  Death,'  I  said,  *not  Love,  but  thou  shalt  die 
For,  this  I  know,  though  thine  is  now  the  hour, 
And  thine  these  angry  clouds  of  doom  that  lour. 
Death  striking  Love  but  strikes  to  deify.' 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  315 

"Yet  while  I  spoke  I  sighed  in  loneliness, 
For  strange  seemed  Man,  and  Life  seemed  comfortless, 

And  night,  whom  we  two  loved,  seemed  strange  and  dumb; 
And,  waiting  till  the  dawn  the  promised  sign, 
I  watched — I  listened  for  that  voice  of  thine. 
Though  Reason  said:  'Nor  voice  nor  face  can  come.'" 


Mtlllam  flDorrl0 

William  Morris  was  so  much  more  than  a  poet, 
so  much  more  even  than  a  mere  man  of  letters,  that 
any  attempt  to  set  forth  his  ideals  and  his  activities 
in  these  few  pages  must  be  hopelessly  inadequate.  He 
was  so  full  of  life,  his  interests  were  so  many  ancl 
so  varied,  his  capacity  for  work  so  extraordinary, 
that  many  phases  of  his  career  must  be  left  un- 
touched during  the  present  discussion.  He  requires  a 
volume  merely  to  enumerate  the  titles  of  all  his  books 
and  fugitive  writings.  Yet  literature  was  his  avoca- 
tion rather  than  hjs  vocation,  for  the  greater  part 
of  his  days  were  given  to  the  toil  of  the  craftsman 
and  the  designer.  How  he  turned  from  architecture 
to  mural  decoration,  and  from  that  to  the  drawing 
of  patterns  for  carpets  and  wall-papers,  and  from 
that  to  the  task  of  giving  artistic  form  to  other 
kinds  of  household  furnishings,  and  from  that  again 
to  the  designing  of  type-faces  and  the  printing  of 
beautiful  books,  is  a  story  that  must  be  left  to  his 
biographer.  It  is  only  by  a  minute  study  of  his  life 
that  we  can  fully  realise  what  all  these  activities 
meant  to  him.  For  he  entered  into  every  one  of  them 
with  his  whole  soul,  and  every  one  of  them  required 
from  him  many  forms  of  collateral  investigation  and 

316 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  317 

observation  and  experiment.  It  is  something  of  a 
surprise  to  us  that  his  friend  Rossetti  should  have 
achieved  mastery  in  the  two  arts  of  poetry  and  paint- 
ing; it  is  with  a  feeHng  more  bewildering  than  sur- 
prise that  we  learn  of  the  mastery  achieved  by  Morris 
in  arts  and  crafts  almost  too  numerous  to  specify. 
In  the  most  familiar  of  his  verses  he  describes  him- 
self as  "the  idle  singer  of  an  empty  day."  When  Ros- 
setti parodied  this  line  into  "the  busy  Morris  of  a 
twelve  hours'  da}^"  he  gave  but  an  imperfect  ex- 
pression to  the  tireless  energy  by  which  the  career 
of  Morris  was  characterised  from  first  to  last. 

"He  had  time  to  read,  to  study, — and  some  of  his  Scandinavian 
studies,  in  particular,  involved  prolonged  time  and  absorp- 
tion,— to  write  incessantly  in  imaginative  prose,  in  verse;  to 
occupy  himself  with  socialistic  labours,  humanitarian  pam- 
phlets, speeches,  papers;  to  make  his  house  a  centre  for  the 
'advanced  wing;'  to  work  daily  at  some  one  or  other  of  his 
innumerable  decorative  undertakings;  and  to  superintend  a 
busy  and  complex  business,  for  a  business  in  the  ordinary  sense 
the  manufacture  of  decorative  tapestry  and  other  craft-pro- 
ductions unquestionably  was." 

These  words  of  his  friend  William  Sharp  giv®  us 
some  idea  of  his  complex  activity. 

"Dreamer  of  dreams,  born  out  of  my  due  time, 
Why  should  I  strive  to  set  the  crooked  straight?" — 

this  was  the  self-questioning  note  with  which  he  intro- 
duced "The  Earthly  Paradise"  to  its  readers.  In 
reality,  nothing  could  be  less  typical  of  the  man  than 
this,  for  he  did  set  the  crooked  straight  in  more  ways 


318  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

than  one,  and  he  knew  better  than  most  men  how 
to  give  practical  effect  to  his  dreams. 

Morris  made  his  first  contributions  to  hterature 
through  the  medium  of  The  Oxford  and  Cambridge 
Magazine,  which,  as  has  previously  been  stated, 
was  published  during  the  one  year  of  1856.  In  that 
short-hved  periodical  a  few  of  his  poems  were  pub- 
hshed,  and  also  those  early  prose  romances  which 
must  be  regarded  as  the  precursors  of  the  long  series 
with  which  his  closing  years  were  occupied.  Two 
years  later  he  published  "The  Defence  of  Guenevere 
and  Other  Poems,"  his  first  volume,  which  was  also 
the  first  that  proceeded  from  the  Pre-Raphaelite 
group  of  poets.  The  volume  was  almost  unnoticed 
by  the  professional  critics,  and  it  did  not  reach  any 
large  number  of  readers  until  the  poet  of  "The 
Earthly  Paradise"  had  become  so  famous  that  a  re- 
print of  his  early  verse  was  demanded.  It  was  a 
volume  inspired  in  part  by  Malory,  and  in  part  by 
the  ballad-poetry  of  the  fifteenth  century.  The  note 
which  it  struck  was  unheeded  by  the  public  whose 
ears  had  become  attuned  to  Tennysonian  measures 
and  cadences,  and  only  a  reader  here  and  there  was 
found  responsive  to  its  appeal.  Yet  the  volume  con- 
tained many  pages  of  wonderful  beauty,  of  a  beauty 
which  now,  after  more  than  a  generation  of  schooling 
in  a  fashion  which  seemed  then  so  strange,  we  can 
both  understand  and  cherish.  We  wonder  now  that 
such  a  volume  could  have  fallen  still-born  from  the 
press  at  any  time,  yet  that  was  its  fate.     Such  a 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  319 

poem  as  the  irregular  sonnet  entitled  "Summer 
Dawn,"  for  example,  has  a  quiet  beauty  that  would 
seem  to  make  it  altogether  independent  of  any  lit- 
erary fashion. 

"Pray  but  one  prayer  for  me  'twixt  thy  closed  lips, 
Think  but  one  thought  of  me  up  in  the  stars. 

The  summer  night  waneth,  the  morning  light  slips. 
Faint  and  grey  'twixt  the  leaves  of  the  aspen,  betwixt 
the  cloud-bars. 

That  are  patiently  waiting  there  for  the  dawn: 
Patient  and  colourless,  though  Heaven's  gold 

Waits  to  float  through  them  along  with  the  sun. 

Far  out  in  the  meadows,  above  the  young  corn, 
The  heavy  elms  wait,  and  restless  and  cold 

The  uneasy  wind  rises;  the  roses  are  dun; 

Through  the  long  twilight  they  pray  for  the  dawn, 

Round  the  lone  house  in  the  midst  of  the  corn. 
Speak  but  one  word  to  me  over  the  corn. 
Over  the  tender,  bow'd  locks  of  the  corn." 

It  is  true  that  this  poem  is  somewhat  smoother  in 
diction  and  more  nearly  conventional  in  manner  than 
the  majority  of  those  with  which  it  was  associated  in 
that  significant  first  volume  of  Pre-Raphaelite  song. 
It  is  also  true  that  many  of  the  poems  were  carelessly, 
almost  recklessly,  put  together,  were  anytliing  but 
clear  in  their  meaning,  and  were  sometimes  harsh  in 
their  expression.  But  one  could  not  examine  the 
volume  at  all  closely  without  realising  that  a  forceful 
individuality  stood  behind  it,  or  that  it  embodied  a 
noteworthy  individual  utterance.  As  Swinburne 
says:  "Such  things  as  were  in  this  book  are  taught 
and  learnt  in  no  school  but  that  of  instinct.     Upon 


320  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

no  piece  of  work  in  the  world  was  the  impress  of  na- 
tive character  ever  more  distinctly  stamped,  more 
deeply  branded.  It  needed  no  exceptional  acuteness 
of  ear  or  eye  to  see  or  hear  that  this  poet  held  of 
none,  stole  from  none,  clung  to  none,  as  tenant  or  as 
beggar  or  as  thief.  Not  as  yet  a  master,  he  was 
assuredly  no  longer  a  pupil." 

The  very  year  in  which  the  public  turned 
a  deaf  ear  to  the  studies  of  Morris  in  Arthurian 
legend  was  the  year  in  which  the  most  popular 
poet  of  the  age  was  engaged  in  completing 
the  first  section  of  his  "Idylls  of  the  King." 
This  was  the  sort  of  Arthurian  romance  that 
the  public  found  acceptable,  and  the  immediate 
vogue  of  Tennyson's  poem  stands  in  striking  con- 
trast to  the  neglect  with  which  Morris  was  treated 
when  he  besought  the  interest  of  readers  for  his  own 
studies  in  Malory.  I  have  no  intention  of  exalting 
the  "Guenevere"  of  Morris  at  the  expense  of  the 
"Guinevere"  of  Tennyson;  the  latter  poem,  together 
with  the  whole  cycle  of  Idylls  to  which  it  belongs, 
constituted  a  far  greater  contribution  to  English 
poetry  than  did  the  Arthurian  studies  of  Morris. 
Tennyson  was  perfect  where  Morris  was  imperfect, 
strong  where  he  was  weak,  but  it  is  nevertheless  true 
that  the  Tennysonian  version  of  Malory  was  a  highly 
sophisticated  one,  was  infused  with  modern  sentiment 
and  modern  ethics,  whereas  the  version  made  by 
Morris  was  a  sincere  reproduction  of  the  manner 
and  feehng  of  the  fifteenth  century.     Taking  "King 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  321 

Arthur's  Tomb"  as  an  example,  Swinburne  says  "it 
has  not  been  constructed  at  all ;  the  parts  hardly  hold 
together;  it  has  need  of  joists  and  screws,  props  and 
rafters.  .  .  .  There  is  scarcely  connection  here,  and 
scarcely  composition.  There  is  hardly  a  trace  of 
narrative  power  or  mechanical  arrangement.  There 
is  a  perceptible  want  of  tact  and  practice,  which 
Jeaves  the  poem  in  parts  indecorous  and  chaotic. 
(But  where  among  better  and  older  poets  of  his  time 
and  country  is  one  comparable  for  perception  and 
expression  of  tragic  truthyof  subtle  and  noble,  ter- 
rible and  piteous  things.-^  where  a  touch  of  passion 
at  once  so  broad  and  so  sure.^"  Morris  was  so  dis- 
couraged by  the  fact  that  the  public  preferred  Ten- 
nyson's treatment  of  Malory  to  his  own  that  he  kept 
silent  for  nearly  ten  years,  when  his  "Jason"  won 
for  him  all  the  applause  of  which  his  "Guenevere" 
had  failed.  But  he  was  enabled  to  understand,  as  the 
years  went  on,  that  his  first  volume  had  not  been 
without  its  influence  in  shaping  the  new  imaginative 
tendency  of  English  poetry.  Like  Landor's  "Gebir," 
it  had  won  the  suffrages  of  the  elect,  and  its  influ- 
ence, although  hidden,  had  been  far-reaching.  This 
first  volume,  in  the  words  of  his  biographer,  "is  one 
of  those  books  which,  without  ever  reaching  a  wide 
circle  or  a  large  popularity,  have  acted  with  great 
intensity  on  a  small  circle  of  minds,  and,  to  those 
on  whom  they  fully  struck  home,  given  a  new  colour 
to  the  art  of  poetry  and  the  whole  imaginative  as- 
pect of  things." 


322  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

"The  Life  and  Death  of  Jason"  was  published  in 
1867,  and  achieved  instant  popularity.  Here  was 
verse  that  did  not  require  from  its  readers  a  com- 
plete readjustment  of  their  ideals,  verse  which  was 
simple  and  direct  and  sincere,  verse  of  which  the  cur- 
rent was  both  strong  and  limpid.  It  seemed  to 
restore  to  Enghsh  poetry  the  art  of  narrative,  which 
had  been  almost  forgotten  since  the  fourteenth  cen- 
tury. The  poet  had  now  gone  back  of  Malory  for 
his  inspiration,  back  to  "the  well  of  English  unde- 
filed."  His  tribute  to  Chaucer  in  the  closing  book 
of  the  poem  is  so  beautiful  that  I  must  quote  it, 
although  it  has  been  quoted  numberless  times  before. 


"Would  that  I 

Had  but  some  portion  of  that  mastery 

That  from  the  rose-hung  lanes  of  woodj  Kent 

Through  these  five  hundred  years  such  songs  have  sent 

To  us,  who  meshed  within  this  smoky  net 

Of  unrejoicing  labour,  love  them  yet. 

And  thou,  O  Master! — Yes,  my  Master  still. 

Whatever  feet  have  scaled  Parnassus  hill, 

Since  like  thy  measures,  clear,  and  sweet,  and  strong, 

Thames'  stream  scarce  fettered  bore  the  bream  along 

Unto  the  bastioned  bridge,  his  only  chain — 

O  Master,  pardon  me,  if  yet  in  vain 

Thou  art  my  Master,  and  I  fail  to  bring 

Before  men's  ej'es  the  image  of  the  thing 

My  heart  is  filled  with:  thou  whose  dreamy  eyes 

Beheld  the  flush  to  Cressid's  cheeks  arise. 

When  Troilus  rode  up  the  praising  street, 

As  clearly  as  they  saw  thy  townsmen  meet 

Those  who  in  vineyards  of  Poictou  withstood 

The  glittering  horror  of  the  steel-topped  wood." 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  323 

But  there  was  no  need,  save  for  the  sake  of  its  own 
beauty,  that  the  poet  should  make  this  acknowledg- 
ment of  grateful  discipleship.  No  one  could  read 
the  new  poem  without  thinking  of  Chaucer,  or  with- 
out something  of  surprised  reahsation  of  the  fact 
that  there  had  been  no  such  romantic  narrative  in 
English  poetry  since  the  time  of  Chaucer.  "In  all 
the  noble  role  of  our  poets  there  has  been  since 
Chaucer  no  second  teller  of  tales,  no  second  rhapsode 
comparable  to  the  first,  till  the  advent  of  this  one." 
These  were  Swinburne's  words,  and  they  were  sub- 
stantially the  words  of  all  the  other  critics.  "Rarely 
but  in  the  ballad  and  romance  periods  has  such 
poetry  been  written,  so  broad  and  sad  and  simple, 
so  full  of  deep  and  direct  fire,  certain  of  its  aim, 
without  finish,  without  fault.  .  .  .  Even  against 
the  great  master  his  pupil  may  fairly  be  matched  for 
simple  sense  of  right,  for  grace  and  speed  of  step, 
for  purity  and  justice  of  colour." 

At  the  time  when  "Jason"  was  given  to  the  public, 
a  still  more  ambitious  narrative  work  was  well  under 
way.  In  fact,  "Jason"  itself  had  been  planned  as  a 
part  of  that  larger  work,  but  had  so  outrun  the  orig- 
inal intention  of  the  author  that  it  had  to  be  pub- 
hshed  as  an  independent  poem.  The  larger  work 
of  which  I  am  speaking  was,  of  course,  "The  Earthly 
Paradise,"  and  the  volume  which  contained  "Jason" 
contained  also  an  announcement  that  the  larger  work 
was  in  preparation.  The  plan  of  "The  Earthly 
Paradise"  is  so  well  known  that  I  do  not  need  to 


324  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

enlarge  upon  it  in  detail.  Following  in  the  foot- 
steps of  Chaucer  and  Boccaccio,  the  author's  design 
was  to  tell  a  long  series  of  stories,  and  to  devise  a 
framework  for  the  structure  that  should  have  at 
least  the  appearance  of  verisimiHtude,  and  that 
should  serve  to  hnk  together  tales  of  the  most  varied 
provenance.  UnHke  Chaucer  and  Boccaccio,  how- 
ever, the  tales  which  Morris  wished  to  tell  were  the 
world-famous  tales  of  classical  and  mediaeval  tradi- 
tion. It  was  something  of  a  problem  to  invent  a 
situation  which  should  justify  the  bringing  together 
of  stories  from  such  different  sources,  and  which 
should  give  any  degree  of  coherency  to  the  work  as 
a  whole. 

The  tradition  upon  which  the  structure  of  "The 
Earthly  Paradise"  was  based,  although  purely  fanci- 
ful, was  not  without  certain  analogies  in  fact.  As 
Mr.  Mackail  says: 

"The  Greek  epic,  it  is  true,  ends  in  the  fifth  century;  but 
Greek  poetry  went  on  being  written  certainly  till  the  eleventh; 
and  the  collection  of  minor  poetry  known  as  the  Anthology 
owes  its  final  form  to  a  Byzantine  scholar  who  was  ambassador 
to  Venice  at  the  time  of  Edward  III.'s  accession  to  the  crown 
of  England,  and  was  probably  still  alive  when  Chaucer  was 
born.  .  .  .  Given  then,  this  living  tradition  of  early  Greece, 
inherited  by  some  outlying  fragment  of  the  Greek  speech  and 
blood  such  as  actually  existed  for  some  hundreds  of  years  in 
Central  Asia,  for  some  hundreds  more  in  Southern  Russia, 
and  might  conceivably  have  existed  in  some  remote  ocean 
fastness  much  longer:  given  a  sufficient  reason  for  the 
inheritors  of  this  tradition  being  joined,  in  their  for- 
gotten island,  by  a  group  of  mixed  Western  blood,  Germanic, 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  325 

Norse,  and  Celtic,  bearing  with  them  the  mass  of  stories  cur- 
rent in  their  own  time  throughout  western  Europe;  and  a 
setting  is  provided  in  which  may  be  rationally  included  any 
story  in  the  world.  Make  this  reason  a  combination  of  the 
Norse  explorations  of  the  Atlantic  and  the  earliest  discoveries 
of  America  with  the  flight  out  of  a  land  stricken  with  the  Black 
Death,  and  there  results  the  whole  idea  and  structure  of  "Tlie 
Earthly  Paradise.' " 

The  plan  thus  devised  is  carried  out  with  great  skill. 
The  wanderers  of  the  poet's  invention,  embarked  in 
quest  of  adventure,  are  driven  out  of  their  course  by 
a  tempest,  and  at  last  find  a  haven  in 

"A  nameless  city  in  a  distant  sea, 
White  as  the  changing  walls  of  faerie." 

Here  in  this  outpost  of  a  civilisation  that  has  van- 
ished from  Europe  they  are  warmly  welcomed  by 
the  elders  of  the  city,  and  bidden  to  remain  as  guests. 
After  a  year  has  gone  by,  and  spring  has  come  again, 
"when  new-born  March  made  fresh  the  hopeful  air," 
the  wanderers  are  assembled  one  day  with  the  elders 
of  the  city,  and  the  chief  priest  thus  addresses  them : 

"Dear  Guests,  the  year  begins  to-day. 
And  fain  are  we,  before  it  pass  away. 
To  hear  some  tales  of  that  now  altered  world, 
Wherefrom  our  fathers  in  old  time  were  hurled 
By  the  hard  hands  of  fate  and  destiny. 
Nor  would  ye  hear  perchance  unwillingly 
How  we  have  dwelt  with  stories  of  the  land 
Wherein  the  tombs  of  our  forefathers  stand: 
Wherefore  henceforth  two  solemn  feasts  shall  be 
In  every  month,  at  which  some  history 


326  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

Shall  cro^\Ti  our  joyance;  and  this  day,  indeed, 

I  have  a  story  ready  for  our  need. 

If  ye  will  hear  it,  though  perchance  it  is 

That  many  things  therein  are  writ  amiss. 

This  part  forgotten,  that  part  grown  too  great, 

For  these  things,  too,  are  in  the  hands  of  fate." 

Thus  the  story-telling  begins,  and  each  month  of 
the  ensuing  year  the  wanderers  exchange  tales  with 
their  hosts,  the  latter  recounting  such  classical  leg- 
ends as  the  race  of  Atalanta,  the  love  of  Alcestis,  the 
death  of  Paris,  and  the  quest  of  the  golden  apples 
of  the  Hesperides ;  the  former  respondmg  with  such 
mediaeval  stories  as  that  of  Ogier  the  Dane,  of  the 
land  east  of  the  sun  and  west  of  the  moon,  and  of 
the  hollow  liill  wherein  Lady  Venus  set  sensual  snares 
for  the  souls  of  pious  pilgrims  who  found  their  way 
to  her  unblest  abode.  When  the  year  is  ended,  and 
the  two  dozen  stories  are  all  told,  both  guests  and 
hosts  are  left  to  their  old  age,  and  their  approaching 
death.  The  work  ends,  as  "Jason"  did,  with  a  tribute 
to  the  memory  of  Chaucer. 

"O  Master,  if  thine  heart  could  love  as  yet. 
Spite  of  things  left  undone,  and  wrongly  done. 
Some  place  in  loving  hearts  then  should  we  get. 
For  thou,  sweet-souled,  didst  never  stand  alone. 
But  knew'st  the  joy  and  woe  of  many  an  one — 
— By  lovers  dead,  who  live  through  thee,  we  pray, 
Help  thou  us  singers  of  an  empty  day !" 

The  forty  thousand  lines  to  which  "The  Earthly 
Paradise"  extends  embrace  such  a  treasure  of  narra- 
tive romance  as  Enghsh  poetry  had  not  seen  since 


1 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  327 

the  time  of  the  master  whom  Morris  acknowledged 
as  his  exemplar.  Nearly  five  hundred  years  had  to 
elapse  after  the  death  of  Chaucer  before  England 
could  produce  his  peer  as  a  story-teller  by  right 
divine.  But  the  similarity  between  the  two  poets 
does  not  extend  far  beyond  this  fact.  Chaucer's 
tales  were  in  their  essence  prophetic  rather  than 
retrospective;  they  heralded  the  coming  glories  of 
English  literature,  they  were  in  a  sense  the  precursors 
of  the  Elizabethan  drama  and  the  modern  novel.  The 
tales  told  by  Morris  have  in  common  with  them  little 
except  the  qualities  of  easy  rhythm  and  noble  diction 
that  belong  to  all  great  poetry,  and  the  fact  that 
they  are  tales  and  not  subjective  outpourings.  Of 
the  wit,  the  shrewdness,  the  practical  good  sense,  the 
dramatic  faculty,  and  the  insight  into  the  recesses  of 
individual  character  displayed  by  Chaucer,  there  is 
very  little  to  be  found  in  Morris ;  but  we  find  instead 
the  conception  of  men  as  types  rather  than  indi- 
viduals, the  fresh  and  simple  outlook  upon  nature, 
the  very  breath  and  finer  spirit  of  all  romance.  We 
find,  too,  a  curious  blend  of  Hellenism  with  mediaeval- 
ism,  or  rather  an  amalgam  of  the  elements  of  pure 
beauty  common  to  both  styles,  the  objectivity,  the 
simplicity,  and  the  grace  of  an  art  hardly  tinged  with 
self-consciousness  and  innocent  of  any  concealed  ulte- 
rior motive.  Pure  beauty  may  indeed  be  taken  as 
the  note  of  nearly  all  the  poetry  that  William  Morris 
has  left  for  the  enrichment  of  our  literature.  "Full 
of  soft  music  and  familiar  olden  charm,"  to  use  Mr. 


328  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

Stedman's  felicitous  phrase,  it  has  the  power  to  lull 
the  senses  into  forgetfulness  of  this  modern  worka- 
day world,  to  restore  the  soul  with  draughts  from 
the  wellsprings  of  life,  to  bring  back  the  wonder  of 
childhood,  the  glory  and  the  dream  that  we  may  per- 
haps have  thought  to  be  vanished  beyond  recall.  It 
is  poetry  to  read  in  the  long  summer  days  when  we 
seek  rest  from  strenuous  endeavour;  it  is  poetry  for 
the  beguilement  of  all  weariness,  and  for  the  refresh- 
ment of  our  faith  in  the  simple  virtues  and  the  unso- 
phisticated life;  it  is  poetry  that  brings  a  whole- 
some and  healing  ministry  akin  to  that  of  Nature 
herself ;  it  is  poetry  that  leaves  the  recollection  unsul- 
lied by  any  suggestion  of  impurity  and  unhaunted 
by  any  spectre  of  doubt.  Like  Lethe,  it  has  the  gift 
of  oblivion  for  those  who  seek  the  embrace  of  its 
waters;  but,  unlike  the  dark-flowing  stream  of  the 
underworld,  its  surface  is  rippled  by  the  breezes  of 
earth,  its  banks  are  overarched  by  living  foliage,  and 
its  waves  mirror  the  glad  sunlight. 

There  is,  however,  about  "The  Earthly  Paradise" 
a  cast  of  melancholy  that  we  find  it  difficult  to  recon- 
cile with  the  poet's  own  healthy  and  robust  person- 
ality. The  immensely  rich  and  varied  activity  of  his 
life,  and  the  abounding  vitality  that  characterised 
him  throughout  his  career,  in  no  wise  suggest  the 
poetry  of  languor  and  world-weariness,  yet  such  un- 
doubtedly is  the  poetry  of  "The  Earthly  Paradise." 
The  vanitas  vanitatum  of  the  Preacher  is  the  ever- 
recurrent  strain  of  the  prologue,  the  envoi,  and  the 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  329 

lyrical  passages  that  serve  to  connect  the  several 
stories.  The  feeling  that  thus  finds  expression  is  a 
genuine  pessimism,  a  very  different  thing  from  the 
rhetorical  lamentations  of  Byron  and  his  imitators. 

"The  heavy  trouble,  the  bewildering  care 
That  veighs  us  down  who  live  and  earn  our  bread, 
These  idle  verses  have  no  power  to  bear," 

is  the  disclaimer  which  is  made  at  the  very  outset. 

"Dreamer  of  dreams,  born  out  of  my  due  time, 
Why  should  I  strive  to  set  the  crooked  straight? 
Let  it  suffice  me  that  my  murmuring  rhyme 
Beats  with  light  wing  against  the  ivory  gate. 
Telling  a  tale  not  too  importunate 
To  those  who  in  the  sleepy  regions  stay. 
Lulled  by  the  singer  of  an  empty  day." 

Scattered  through  the  work  we  find  many  expressions 
of  the  blank  hopelessness  that  sometimes  takes  pos- 
session of  the  soul,  and  makes  all  nature  seem  awry 
even  in  her  fairest  moods. 

"Shall  it  not  hap  that  on  some  dawn  of  May 
Thou  shalt  awake,  and,  thinking  of  days  dead, 
See  nothing  clear  but  this  same  dreary  day 
Of  all  the  days  that  have  passed  o'er  thine  head? 
Shalt  thou  not  wonder,  looking  from  thy  bed. 
Through  green  leaves  on  the  windless  east  a-fire. 
That  this  day  too  thine  heart  doth  still  desire? 

"Shalt  thou  not  wonder  that  it  liveth  yet. 
The  useless  hope,  the  useless  craving  pain, 
That  made  thy  face,  that  lonely  noontide,  wet 
With  more  than  beating  of  the  chilly  rain? 
Shalt  thou  not  hope  for  joy  new  born  again. 


330  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

Since  no  grief  ever  born  can  ever  die 

Through  changeless  change  of  seasons  passing  by?" 

And  at  the  very  end  of  the  work  we  are  again  re- 
minded that  "each  tale's  ending  needs  must  be  the 
same,  and  we  men  call  it  Death."  And  still  again, 
addressing  Death,  the  verses  say : 

"Thus  do  we  work  that  thou  mayst  take  away ! 
Look  at  this  beauty  of  young  children's  mirth! 
Soon  to  be  swallowed  by  thy  noiseless  dearth ! 
Look  at  this  faithful  love  that  knows  no  end 
Unless  thy  cold  thrill  through  it  thou  shouldst  send  I 
Look  at  this  hand  ripening  to  perfect  skill 
Unless  the  fated  measure  thou  didst  fill; 
This  eager  knowledge  that  would  stop  for  nought. 
Unless  thy  net  both  chase  and  hunter  caught !" 

But  of  all  this  seemingly  settled  melancholy  there  are 
two  things  that  should  in  fairness  be  said.  Although 
the  subjective  element  is  unquestionably  predominant 
in  the  lyrical  interludes  of  "The  Earthly  Paradise," 
there  is  something  of  the  dramatic  element  as  well. 
The  poet  is  depicting  the  mood  of  old  age,  which  has 
lost  the  spring  and  the  ardour  of  youth,  and  to  which 
the  stories  told  can  offer  only  a  brief  beguilement. 
And  of  Morris  himself  it  must  be  said  that  he  out- 
grew the  mood  in  which  "The  Earthly  Paradise"  was 
written,  and  came  to  have  a  braver  belief  in  actual 
life  than  it  would  indicate.  The  somewhat  morbid 
dread  of  death  which  haunted  his  earlier  years  passed 
almost  completely  away,  and  he  found  a  new  hope 
for  mankind  in  the  social  reorganisation  which  he  be- 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  S31 

lieved  to  be  near  at  hand,  and  of  which  he  became 
a  whole-hearted  advocate.  Of  this  I  shall  have  much 
to  say  a  little  later,  but  before  coming  to  the  story 
of  his  work  for  socialism,  it  is  necessary  to  take  some 
further  account  of  his  intellectual  development. 

Morris  was  born  with  a  sympathy  for  the  mediae- 
val spirit,  and  a  power  to  enter  into  the  conscious- 
ness of  early  epochs  and  primitive  peoples.  View- 
ing his  activity  as  a  whole,  it  will  be  seen  that  the 
mediaevalism  wherein  he  took  delight  covered  a  more 
extended  period  than  that  which  we  usually  associate 
with  the  term.  It  is  a  period  which  stretches,  roughly 
speaking,  all  the  way  back  from  Malory  and  Chaucer 
to  Beowulf  and  the  Eddas.  As  we  follow  the  suc- 
cession of  his  ideals,  it  is  extremely  interesting  to  note 
how  they  harked  ever  backward  toward  simpler 
societies  and  more  primitive  conditions.  We  have 
already  seen  how  the  enthusiasm  for  Malory  gave 
place  to  the  enthusiasm  for  Chaucer,  and  how  deeply 
his  interests  were  enlisted  by  the  wealth  of  mediaeval 
romance  and  legend  in  the  narrower  sense,  by  the 
"matter  of  France  and  of  Britain  and  of  Rome  the 
Great,"  by  Germanic  myth  and  the  "Golden  Legend" 
of  the  lives  of  the  Saints.  A  critical  point  in  his 
development  was  reached  during  the  writing  of  "The 
Earthly  Paradise,"  in  which  we  note  the  gradual 
subordination  of  romance  to  epic.  The  stories  of  the 
type  of  "The  Man  Born  to  Be  King"  give  place  to 
stories  of  the  type  of  "The  Lovers  of  Gudrun."  It 
was,  indeed,  during  the  years  which  found  Morris 


332  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

occupied  with  "The  Earthly  Paradise,"  that  his 
interest  became  awakened  in  Icelandic  hterature,  and 
that  he  entered  upon  those  studies  of  the  saga-men  and 
their  works  which  were  to  occupy  a  large  share  of  his 
thoughts  for  the  rest  of  his  life.  His  translation 
of  the  "Grettis  Saga"  was  published  in  1869,  and 
his  translation  of  the  "Volsunga  Saga"  in  the  follow- 
ing year.  The  labour  of  these  translations,  as  well 
as  of  those  included  many  years  afterwards  in  "The 
Saga  Library,"  was  shared  with  Morris  by  his 
teacher  and  friend  Professor  Magnusson.  Of  all  the 
enthusiasms  which  successively  took  possession  of 
Morris  during  his  long  and  busy  life,  this  enthu- 
siasm for  the  literature  of  the  old  Norsemen  was 
probably  the  greatest,  as  well  as  the  most  significant 
as  a  shaping  influence  upon  his  ideals.  In  those  mar- 
vellous writings  which  for  two  or  three  centuries 
made  the  little  volcanic  island  close  up  to  the  Arctic 
Circle  one  of  the  most  important  literary  centres  of 
the  world,  he  found  a  native  vigour  and  a  clean  per- 
fection of  style  which  seemed  to  him  even  more  ad- 
mirable than  what  Malory  and  Chaucer  had  to  offer. 
It  became  his  ambition  to  convert  into  English  as 
much  of  this  literature  as  he  might,  and,  a  number 
of  years  later,  to  create  sagas  of  his  own.  The 
interest  thus  strongly  aroused  in  him  made  it  in- 
evitable that  he  should  seek  out  the  scenes  which  had 
given  it  birth,  and  so  we  find  him,  in  the  summer  of 
1871,  setting  out  for  the  Island  of  Fire.  "To  enter 
into  his  feelings,"  says  Mr.  Mackail, 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  888 

"one  must  imagine  a  strange  combination  of  Johnson  in  the 
Hebrides  and  Byron  in  Greece.  .  .  .  The  heroic  stories  of 
Iceland  stood  in  his  mind  at  the  head  of  the  world's  literature; 
the  deeds  which  they  chronicled  were  the  summit  in  their  tragic 
force  of  all  human  achievement.  And  the  Icelandic  Republic 
represented  more  nearly  than  any  other  state  of  things  re- 
corded in  history,  the  political  and  social  framework  of  life 
which  satisfied  his  mind  and  imagination.  On  the  Law-Mound 
of  Thingvalla,  by  the  steads  of  Herdholt  or  Lithend,  he  stood 
with  deeper-kindled  emotion  than  would  have  been  roused  in 
him  in  the  Roman  Forum  or  on  the  Athenian  Acropolis,  or 
where  grass  grows  over  the  fallen  towers  of  Troy." 

In  one  of  the  most  beautiful  of  his  "Poems  By  the 
Way,"  he  describes  the  feelings  with  which  he  neared 
the  coast  of  Iceland. 

"Lo  from  our  loitering  ship 
a  new  land  at  last  to  be  seen; 
Toothed  rocks  down  the  side  of  the  firth 
on  the  east  guard  a  weary  wide  lea. 
And  black  slope  the  hillsides  above, 
striped  adown  with  their  desolate  green: 
And  a  peak  rises  up  on  the  west 
from  the  meeting  of  cloud  and  of  sea. 
Foursquare  from  base  unto  point 
like  the  buildings  of  Gods  that  have  been. 
The  last  of  that  waste  of  the  mountains, 
all  cloud-wreathed  and  snow-flecked  and  grey, 
And  bright  with  the  dawn  that  began 
just  now  at  the  ending  of  day. 

"Ah !  what  came  we  forth  for  to  see 
that  our  hearts  are  so  hot  with  desire? 
Is  it  enough  for  our  rest, 
the  sight  of  this  desolate  strand. 
And  the  mountain-waste  voiceless  as  death 
but  for  winds  that  may  sleep  not  nor  tire? 


334  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

Why  do  we  long  to  wend  forth 

through  the  length  and  breadth  of  a  land, 

Dreadful  with  grinding  of  ice, 

and  record  of  scarce  hidden  fire. 

But  that  there  mid  the  grey  grassy  dales 

sore  scarred  by  the  ruining  streams 

Lives  the  tale  of  the  Northland  of  old 

and  the  undying  glory  of  dreams?" 

An  Icelandic  paper,  reporting  his  arrival,  described 
him  as  William  Morris,  Skald,  which  greatly  de- 
lighted him.  He  explored  a  considerable  part  of  the 
island,  and  his  explorations  were  extended  upon  the 
occasion  of  his  second  visit  two  years  later.  The 
most  important  product  of  his  Icelandic  studies  is 
the  great  epic  poem  of  "The  Story  of  Sigurd  the 
Volsung  and  the  Fall  of  the  Niblungs,"  which  was 
pubhshed  in  1876.  "This  is  the  Great  Story  of  the 
North,"  he  says,  "which  should  be  to  all  our  race 
what  the  Tale  of  Troy  was  to  the  Greeks :  to  all  our 
race  first,  and  afterwards,  when  the  change  of  the 
world  has  made  our  race  nothing  more  than  a  name  of 
what  has  been,  a  story  too,  then  should  it  be  to  those 
that  come  after  us  no  less  than  the  Tale  of  Troy 
has  been  to  us."  No  doubt  Morris  would  have  dealt 
with  this  epic  material  in  some  superb  fashion  had  he 
never  visited  the  home  of  the  race  which  conceived 
it;  but  there  is  no  doubt  also  that  it  drew  a  fresher 
and  more  vital  inspiration  from  the  direct  contact 
of  the  author  with  the  people  and  the  scenes  which 
it  describes.  Compared  with  the  primitive  power 
of  the  treatment  of  this  great  theme  by  Morris,  its 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  885 

treatment  by  Wagner,  and  even  its  treatment  by 
Ibsen,  seems  somewhat  modernised  and  sophisticated. 
"In  this  great  work,"  says  William  Sharp, 

"we  come  upon  William  Morris  as  the  typical  saga-man  of 
modern  literature.  The  breath  of  the  North  blows  across  these 
billowy  lines,  as  the  polar  wind  across  the  green  waves  of  the 
North  Sea.  The  noise  of  waters,  the  splashing  of  oars,  the 
whirling  of  swords,  the  conflict  of  battle,  cries  and  heroic 
summons  to  death,  reecho  in  the  reader's  ears.  All  the  romance 
which  gives  so  wonderful  an  atmosphere  to  his  earlier  poems, 
all  the  dreamy  sweetness  of  'The  Earthly  Paradise'  and  creations 
such  as  *Love  is  Enough,'  are  here  also;  but  with  them  are  a 
force,  a  vigour  and  intensity,  of  which,  save  in  his  translation  of 
the  'Odyssey,'  there  are  few  prior  indications." 

Even  so  pronounced  a  classicist  as  Mr.  Mackail, 
whom  we  could  hardly  expect  to  go  to  the  extreme 
of  enthusiasm  aroused  in  Morris  by  this  subject, 
declares  "Sigurd  the  Volsung"  to  be  "the  most 
Homeric  poem  which  has  been  written  since  Homer." 
As  the  progress  of  "The  Earthly  Paradise"  was 
marked  by  the  slow  infiltration  into  the  author's  mind 
of  a  new  poetic  ideal,  so  we  may  find  in  "Sigurd  the 
Volsung"  the  early  workings  of  still  another  ideal, 
of  the  social  ideal  which  was  to  become  the  chief  con- 
cern of  the  poet  during  the  last  twenty  years  of  his 
life.    In  this  poem,  as  Mr.  Forman  says, 

"Not  only  does  he  fill  a  large  canvas  with  an  art  higher  and 
subtler  than  that  shown  in  'Jason',  or  even  in  'Tlie  Earthly 
Paradise,'  but  he  betrays  a  profound  concern  in  the  destinies 
of  the  race,  such  as  we  do  not  exact  from  the  mere  story- 
teller.   Love  and  adventure  he  had  already  treated  in  a  manner 


336  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

approaching  perfection;  and  a  sympathetic  intelligence  of  all 
beautiful  legends  breathes  throughout  his  works;  but  Sigurd  is 
something  more  than  a  lover  and  a  warrior ;  he  is  at  once  heroic 
and  tragic;  and  he  is  surrounded  by  characters  heroic  and 
tragic.  In  his  mythic  person  large  spiritual  questions  are  sug- 
gested; he  is  the  typical  saviour  as  conceived  by  the  Northern 
race;  and  this  side  of  the  conception  is  more  emphatic  and 
unmistakable  in  the  modern  work  than  in  the  'Volsunga  Saga,' 
which  is  the  basis  of  this  great  poem." 

But  before  turning  to  the  consideration  of  the 
social  reformer  that  had  always  been  latent  in  the 
personality  of  Morris,  we  must  pause  to  consider 
that  wonderful  series  of  romances  in  prose,  with  verse 
interspersed,  which  began  in  1889,  and  ended  in  1896, 
the  year  of  his  death.  "What  is  Morris  going  to  do 
next.'^"  was  a  question  frequently  asked  among  his 
friends.  Of  all  the  surprises  which  he  had  in  store 
both  for  his  friends  and  for  the  larger  public,  none 
was  greater  than  that  occasioned  by  the  appearance 
of  "A  Tale  of  the  House  of  the  Wolfings  and  all  the 
Kindreds  of  the  Mark."  Here  was  a  new  kind  of 
composition,  almost  a  new  kind  of  literature.  It  was 
a  story  of  life  among  the  primitive  Germanic  peo- 
ples, which  may  be  roughly  dated  in  the  fourth  cen- 
tury, and  which  dealt  with  one  of  the  many  attempts 
of  the  Romans  to  subjugate  the  clansmen  and  take 
possession  of  their  land.  A  httle  archaic  in  vocabu- 
lary, and  touched  with  a  primitive  emotion  befitting 
the  childhood  of  our  race,  it  had  also  the  sure  poetic 
vision  and  deeply  sympathetic  feeling  of  the  modem 
artist;  it  gleamed  with  a  light  that  never  was  on 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  337 

either  saga  or  popular  epic.  Here  is  a  passage  which 
may  serve  to  illustrate  its  manner : 

"Then  she  turned  toward  Thiodolf  with  a  calm  and  solemn  facie, 
though  it  was  very  pale  and  looked  as  if  she  would  not  smile 
again.  Elfric  had  risen  up  and  was  standing  by  the  board 
speechless,  and  the  passion  of  sobs  still  struggling  in  her  bosom. 
She  put  him  aside  gently,  and  went  up  to  Thiodolf  and  stood 
above  him,  and  looked  down  on  his  face  awhile;  then  she  put 
forth  her  hand  and  closed  his  eyes,  and  stooped  down,  and 
kissed  his  face.  Then  she  stood  up  again  and  faced  the  Hall, 
and  looked  and  saw  that  many  were  streaming  in,  and  that 
though  the  smoke  was  still  eddying  overhead,  the  fire  was  well- 
nigh  quenched  within,  and  without  the  sound  of  battle  had  sunk 
and  died  away.  For  indeed  the  Markmen  had  ended  their  day's 
work  before  noontide  that  day,  and  the  more  part  of  the 
Romans  were  slain,  and  to  the  rest  they  had  given  peace  till 
the  folk-mote  should  give  Doom  concerning  them;  for  the  pity 
of  these  valiant  men  was  growing  in  the  hearts  of  the  valiant 
men  who  had  vanquished  them,  now  that  they  feared  them  no 


Should  this  sort  of  composition  be  called  prose  or 
poetry.?  It  is  technically  the  former,  but  it  has  all 
the  essential  characteristics  of  the  latter,  excepting, 
of  course,  metrical  form.  Mr.  Theodore  Watts- 
Dunton  discusses  this  question  at  considerable  length, 
and  reaches  the  conclusion  that  the  work  must  be 
called  a  poem.  At  least,  it  is  poetic  prose  in  the  true 
sense,  not  in  the  rhetorical  sense  which  calls  prose 
poetic  because  it  has  some  sort  of  ill-concealed 
rhythmical  movement.    Our  critic  says: 

"While  the   poet's   object   is   to   arouse   in   the  listener   an 
expectancy  of  caesuric  effects,  the  great  goal  before  the  writer 


338  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

of  poetic  prose  is  in  the  very  opposite  direction;  it  is  to  make 
use  of  the  concrete  figures  and  impassioned  diction  that  are 
the  poet's  vehicle,  but  at  the  same  time  to  avoid  the  expectancy 
of  metrical  bars.  The  moment  that  the  regular  bars  assert 
themselves  and  lead  the  reader's  ear  to  expect  other  bars  of  the 
like  kind,  sincerity  ends." 

The  sincerity  of  these  prose  romances  is  as  absolute 
as  their  beauty.  Their  author  has  found  the  true 
springtime  of  the  world,  not  even  in  the  poems  of 
Homer,  but  in  the  sagas  of  Iceland,  in  the  conditions 
of  Germanic  life  of  which  Tacitus  affords  us  a 
glimpse,  and  in  the  still  more  primaeval  regions  which 
myth  and  folk-lore  enable  us  to  penetrate.  And  he 
has  developed  a  style  in  keeping  with  the  life  which 
he  depicts,  a  style  of  severe  and  noble  simplicity  from 
which  the  Latin  element  of  the  language  is  all  but 
wholly  banished.  In  "The  Roots  of  the  Mountains," 
published  a  year  later,  a  similar  situation  is  depicted, 
although  the  people  described  seemed  to  have  taken  a 
step  forward  in  their  social  development,  to  have 
passed  into  the  condition  of  settled  village  commu- 
nities. The  very  titles  of  these  works  are  poems — 
"The  Wood  beyond  the  World,"  "The  Well  at  the 
World's  End,"  "The  Water  of  the  Wondrous  Isles," 
"The  Sundering  Flood,"  and,  best  of  all,  "The  Story 
of  the  Glittering  Plain,  which  Has  Been  also  Called 
the  Land  of  Living  Men  or  the  Acre  of  the  Undying." 
These  seven  romances  are  almost  comparable  with 
"The  Earthly  Paradise"  as  a  source  of  clean  and  pure 
delight,  as  a  refuge  for  the  soul  made  weary  by  mod- 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  839 

ern  perplexities  and  "the  burden  of  the  wronged 
world's  weight." 

It  was  about  twenty  years  before  his  death  that 
Morris  became  connected  with  two  organisations 
which  were  destined  to  react  powerfully  upon  him  for 
the  remainder  of  his  life.  These  organisations  were 
the  Society  for  the  Protection  of  Ancient  Buildings — 
familiarly  known  as  the  Anti-Scrape  Society — which 
Morris  originated;  and  the  Eastern  Question  Asso- 
ciation, to  which  he  contributed  both  time  and  money. 
His  biographer  tells  us  that  "from  Morris's  work  on 
the  former  grew  the  whole  of  his  later  activity  as  a 
lecturer  and  instructor  in  the  principles  of  art,  and 
as  founder  and  leader  of  a  guild  of  craftsmen  who 
exist  now  as  the  permanent  result  of  his  influence. 
From  his  work  on  the  latter  was  developed,  by  a  proc- 
ess of  which  every  step  can  be  clearly  traced,  his  con- 
version to  a  definite  and  dogmatic  socialism."  It  was 
a  fundamental  article  of  his  creed,  as  it  was  of  Rus- 
kin's  and  is  of  Tolstoy's,  that  art  should  not  be  a 
source  of  enjoyment  for  the  cultured  few,  but  a 
solace  for  the  whole  of  mankind.  Art  had  fulfilled 
this  function  in  the  past,  and  the  hopes  of  the  race 
were  largely  bound  up  in  the  restoration  of  art  to 
common  life.  "Time  was,"  he  said  in  a  provincial 
address  made  in  1881, 

"time  was  when  everybody  that  made  anything  made  a  work 
of  art  besides  a  useful  piece  of  goods,  and  it  gave  them 
pleasure  to  make  it.  Whatever  I  doubt,  I  have  no  doubt  of 
that.     I  know  that  in  those  days  life  was  often  rough  and  evil 


340  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

enough,  beset  by  violence,  superstition,  ignorance,  slavery;  yet 
sorely  as  poor  folks  needed  a  solace,  they  did  not  altogether 
lack  one,  and  that  solace  was  a  pleasure  in  their  work  Much 
as  the  world  has  won  since  then,  I  do  not  think  it  has  won  for 
all  men  such  perfect  happiness  that  we  can  afford  to  cast  aside 
any  solace  that  nature  holds  forth  for  us.  Or  must  we  forever 
be  casting  out  one  devil  for  another?  Shall  we  never  make  a 
push  to  get  rid  of  the  whole  pack  of  them  at  once?" 

If  one  accepts  this  proposition — and  it  is  eternally 
true — one  must  array  himself,  as  both  Morris  and 
Ruskin  did,  in  uncompromising  opposition  to  the 
whole  modern  system  of  machine-aided  industry. 
"The  work  which  is  the  result  of  division  of  labour, 
whatever  else  it  can  do,  cannot  produce  art:  which 
must,  as  long  as  the  present  system  lasts,  be  entirely 
confined  to  such  works  as  are  the  work  from  begin- 
ning to  end  of  one  man — pictures,  independent  sculp- 
ture, and  the  like." 

The  sociological  trend  of  the  last  twenty  or  thirty 
years  constitutes  what  is  probably  the  most  char- 
acteristic feature  of  recent  European  literature.  The 
social  consciousness  has  been  aroused  as  never  before, 
and  the  complex  relations  of  men  and  women,  both  to 
each  other  and  to  society  in  the  aggregate,  have 
supplied  themes  for  a  constantly  increasing  number 
of  literary  productions.  It  cannot  have  been  acci- 
dental, it  must  have  been  rather  in  obedience  to  an 
irresistible  tendency  of  modern  thought,  that  such 
men  as  Ruskin,  Tolstoy,  Bjornson,  and  Ibsen  turned 
at  about  the  same  time,  and  as  with  a  common  im- 
pulse, from  the  past  to  the  present,  from  the  romantic 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  341 

to  the  real,  from  work  in  which  the  aesthetical  ele- 
ment was  predominant  to  work  in  which  the  ethical 
element  was  set,  sometimes  far  too  obtrusively,  in 
the  foreground.  Morris  was  a  little  later  to  feel 
this  impulse  than  the  men  who  have  just  been  men- 
tioned, but  when  he  felt  it  at  last  it  took  almost  com- 
plete possession  of  him,  and  became  the  controlling  in- 
fluence upon  his  work.  Mr.  Mackail  speaks  of  "the 
patient  revenge  of  the  modern  or  scientific  spirit,  so 
long  fought  against,  first  by  his  aristocratic,  and  then 
by  his  artistic  instincts,  when  it  took  hold  of  him 
against  his  wiU  and  made  him  a  dogmatic  socialist." 
When  the  Eastern  Question  appeared  as  a  dark  cloud 
upon  the  horizon  of  English  politics  in  1877,  and 
there  was  danger  that  England  herself  would  be 
brought  by  an  unscrupulous  Government  into  the 
vortex  of  the  war  between  Turkey  and  Russia,  Morris 
was  aroused  to  earnest  action,  and,  putting  art  aside 
for  the  nonce,  issued  a  manifesto  "to  the  workingmen 
of  England." 

"Workingmen  of  England,  one  word  of  warning  yet:  I  doubt 
if  you  know  the  bitterness  of  hatred  against  freedom  and 
progress  that  lies  in  the  hearts  of  a  certain  part  of  the  richer 
classes  in  this  country:  their  newspapers  veil  it  in  a  kind  of 
decent  language;  but  do  but  hear  them  talking  among  them- 
selves, as  I  have  often,  and  I  know  not  whether  scorn  or  anger 
would  prevail  in  you  at  their  folly  and  insolence.  These  men 
cannot  speak  of  your  order,  of  its  aims,  of  its  leaders,  without 
a  sneer  or  an  insult:  these  men,  if  they  had  the  power  (may 
England  perish  rather!),  would  thwart  your  just  aspirations, 
would  silence  you,  and  deliver  you  bound  hand  and  foot  forever 
to  irresponsible  capital.    Fellow-Citizens,  look  to  it,  and  if  you 


342  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

have  any  wrongs  to  be  redressed,  if  you  cherish  your  most 
worthy  hope  of  raising  your  whole  order  peacefully,  and  solidly, 
if  you  thirst  for  leisure  and  knowledge,  if  you  long  to  lessen 
these  inequalities  which  have  been  our  stumbling-block  since  the 
beginning  of  the  world,  then  cast  aside  sloth  and  cry  out 
against  an  Unjust  War,  and  urge  us  of  the  middle  classes  to 
do  no  less." 

Comparing  this  utterance  with  that  of  Tennyson 
some  years  later,  in  which  a  similar  question  is  con- 
sidered, we  are  bound  to  declare  in  favour  of  Morris. 
The  poet  who  distrusts  "the  voices  in  the  field," 
and  who  asks  with  scorn  if  "the  suffrage  of  the 
plow"  shall  be  taken  as  a  guide  in  matters  of  impe- 
rial politics,  is  not  as  safe  a  leader  as  the  poet  who 
appeals  to  the  simple  and  humane  instincts  of  the 
masses  whose  interests  are,  after  all,  chiefly  at  stake. 
When  the  crisis  of  1877  was  over,  Morris  was  left 
in  close  touch  with  the  radical  leaders  of  Enghsh 
politics,  and  he  threw  himself  vigorously  into  the 
work  of  the  socialist  propaganda.  His  socialism 
was  never  of  the  theoretical  Marxian  type;  it  was  a 
matter  of  the  heart  much  more  than  of  the  head,  the 
revolt  of  a  simple  and  humane  soul  against  social 
conditions  that  had  come  to  seem  intolerable.  It  was 
conceived  in  the  spirit  of  Chartism,  of  which  the  poet 
possibly  had  some  boyish  memories,  in  the  spirit  of 
the  Christian  socialism  which  Kingsley  and  Maurice 
had  made  popular  a  generation  before.  It  was  a 
socialism  that  for  a  short  time  seemed  to  sanction 
revolutionary  measures,  but  that  soon  became  con- 
vinced that  "ructions  with  pohce"  were  hkely  to  do 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  343 

the  cause  more  harm  than  good.  From  1882  to  1884* 
Morris  was  an  active  member  of  the  Democratic 
Federation,  and  for  the  six  years  following  he  was 
a  member  of  the  Socialist  League.  During  those 
eight  years,  he  was  undergoing  a  process  of  gradual 
disillusionment,  as  he  learned  that  even  the  socialist 
party  had  its  share  of  greed,  of  self-seeking,  and  of 
the  willingness  to  resort  to  unworthy  political  expe- 
dients. His  final  attitude  was  practically  that  of 
the  Fabians,  whose  more  conservative  methods  seemed 
to  give  promise  of  better  results  than  the  militant 
methods  of  his  earlier  associates.  The  literary  out- 
come of  his  socialist  activities  and  dreams  is  illus- 
trated by  "News  from  Nowhere,"  "A  Dream  of  John 
Ball,"  "Songs  of  Change,"  and  the  work  entitled 
"Socialism:  Its  Growth  and  Outcome,"  which  he 
wrote  in  connection  with  Mr.  Belfort  Bax.  These  are 
his  books  upon  the  subject;  his  fugitive  publications 
in  the  form  of  lectures  and  pamphlets  and  leaflets 
and  contributions  to  the  sociaHst  periodicals,  are 
numbered  almost  by  hundreds.  The  most  lasting  lit- 
erary expression  of  these  views  is  given  in  "A  Dream 
of  John  Ball"  and  in  some  of  those  "Poems  by  the 
Way"  which  constitute  the  last  collected  volume  of 
his  verse.  Let  us  listen  for  a  moment  to  "The  Mes- 
sage of  the  March  Wind." 

"Hark!  the  March  wind  again  of  a  people  is  telling; 
Of  the  life  that  they  live  there,  so  haggard  and  grim. 
That  if  we  and  our  love  amidst  them  had  been  dwelling 
My  fondness  had  faltered,  thy  beauty  grown  dim. 


1 


344  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

"This  land  we  have  loved  in  our  love  and  our  leisure 
For  them  hangs  in  heaven,  high  out  of  their  reach; 
The  wide  hills  o'er  the  sea-plain  for  them  have  no  pleasure. 
The  grey  homes  of  their  fathers  no  story  to  teach. 

"The  singers  have  sung  and  the  builders  have  builded, 
The  painters  have  fashioned  their  tales  of  delight; 
For  what  and  for  whom  hath  the  world's  book  been  gilded, 
When  all  is  for  these  but  the  blackness  of  night? 

"How  long,  and  for  what,  is  their  patience  abiding? 
How  oft  and  how  oft  shall  their  story  be  told. 
While  the  hope  that  none  seeketh  in  darkness  is  hiding. 
And  in  grief  and  in  sorrow  the  world  groweth  old?" 

And  what  will  the  world  have  to  offer  when  the  old 
selfish  order  has  passed  away,  and  the  brotherhood 
of  man  has  become  an  accomplished  fact? 

"And  what  wealth  then  shall  be  left  us 
when  none  shall  gather  gold 
To  buy  his  friend  in  the  market, 
and  pinch  and  pine  the  sold? 

"Nay,  what  save  the  lovely  city, 
and  the  little  house  on  the  hill. 
And  the  wastes  and  the  woodland  beauty, 
and  the  happy  fields  we  till; 

"And  the  homes  of  ancient  stories, 
the  tombs  of  the  mighty  dead; 
And  the  wise  men  seeking  out  marvels, 
and  the  poet's  teeming  head; 

"And  the  painter's  hand  of  wonder; 
and  the  marvellous  fiddle-bow. 
And  the  banded  choirs  of  music: 
all  those  that  do  and  know. 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  345 

"For  all  these  shall  be  ours  and  all  men's, 
nor  shall  any  lack  a  share 
Of  the  toil  and  the  gain  of  living 
in  the  days  when  the  world  grows  fair." 

"How  should  it  be,"  says  John  Ball  to  the  men  of 
Kent, 

"when  these  cumberers  of  the  ground  are  gone?  What  else 
shall  ye  lack  when  ye  lack  masters?  Ye  shall  not  lack  for  the 
fields  ye  have  tilled,  nor  the  houses  ye  have  built,  nor  the  cloth 
ye  have  woven;  all  these  shall  be  yours,  and  whatso  ye  will  of 
all  that  the  earth  beareth.  Then  shall  no  man  mow  the  deep 
grass  for  another,  while  his  own  kine  lack  cow-meat;  and  he 
that  soweth  shall  reap,  and  the  reaper  shall  eat  in  fellowship 
the  harvest  that  in  fellowship  he  hath  won ;  and  he  that  buildeth 
a  house  shall  dwell  in  it  with  those  that  he  biddeth  of  his  own 
free  will;  and  the  tithe  barn  shall  garner  the  wheat  for  all  men 
to  eat  of  when  the  seasons  are  untoward,  and  the  rain-drift 
hideth  the  sheaves  in  August;  and  all  shall  be  without  money 
and  without  price.  Faithfully  and  merrily,  then,  shall  all  men 
keep  the  holidays  of  the  Church  in  peace  of  body  and  joy  of 
heart.  And  man  shall  help  man,  and  the  saints  in  heaven  shall 
be  glad,  because  men  no  more  fear  each  other;  and  the  churl 
shall  be  ashamed,  and  shall  hide  his  churlishness  till  it  be  gone, 
and  he  be  no  more  a  churl;  and  fellowship  shall  be  established 
in  heaven  and  on  the  earth." 

This  is  the  earthly  paradise  to  which  the  dreamer  of 
dreams  at  last  found  his  way.  Not  to  an  imagined 
paradise  in  distant  seas,  but  to  an  actual  paradise  in 
the  poet's  own  native  land,  a  paradise  that  men  may 
realise  for  themselves  whenever  they  will,  he  directs 
the  attention  of  his  hearers.  It  is  an  alluring  pros- 
pect, to  ameliorate  the  lot  of  the  toiler,  and  help  him 
to  impart  beauty  to  the  humblest  phases  of  life ;  it  is 


346  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

the  vision,  in  modern  guise,  of  that  "happy  earth," 
the  "reahty  of  Heaven"  whereof  Shelley  sang  in 
the  dawn  of  hope  that  appeared  with  the  new  century 
noAv  dead.  Is  it  altogether  a  satisfactory  ideal? 
There  are  many  who  would  be  reluctant  to  accept  it 
as  the  sum  of  all  human  strivings.  Such  dissenters 
from  the  gospel  according  to  Morris  find  their  feel- 
ings exquisitely  expressed  by  Frederic  Myers,  when  he 
says:  "That  old  and  just  gravamen  against  almost 
all  theological  paradises — that  they  provide  for  joy 
but  not  for  progress — holds  good  of  Morris's  many 
imagined  paradises  as  well.  They  are  abodes  of  un- 
changing bliss,  dimly  felt  to  be  in  themselves  unsat- 
isfactory, though  attractive  in  comparison  with  the 
briefer  pleasures  which  man's  common  life  affords. 
.  .  .  Perhaps,  indeed,  the  fact  may  be  that  man  is 
not  constructed  for  flawless  happiness,  but  for  moral 
evolution."  Carlyle's  contrast  of  blessedness  with 
happiness,  and  Renan's  saying,  "It  is  not  a  question 
of  being  happy,  but  of  being  perfect,"  seem  to  em- 
body a  finer  ethical  ideal  than  that  of  any  seeker  of 
an  earthly  paradise,  present  or  to  come.  But,  in 
any  case,  we  may  find  ourselves  in  the  completest  sym- 
pathy with  Morris  when  he  writes,  as  once  he  wrote 
to  a  friend  bowed  down  by  grief:  "I  entreat  you 
(however  trite  the  words  may  be)  to  think  that  life 
is  not  empty  nor  made  for  nothing,  and  that  the 
parts  of  it  fit  into  one  another  in  some  way ;  and  that 
the  world  goes  on,  beautiful  and  strange  and  dreadful 
and  worshipful."    It  was,  indeed,  no  empty  hfe  that 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  347 

was  ended  in  the  summer  of  1896,  when  Morris  ceased 
from  his  manifold  labours.  Swinburne's  memorial 
tribute,  properly  emphasising  the  humanitarian  as- 
pect of  the  activity  of  his  indefatigable  friend,  may 
be  drawn  upon  for  our  closing  word. 

"No  braver,  no  trustier,  no  purer. 

No  stronger  and  clearer  a  soul 
Bore  witness  more  splendid  and  surer 

For  manhood  found  perfect  and  whole 
Since  man  was  a  warrior  and  dreamer 

Than  his  who  in  hatred  of  wrong 
Would  fain  have  arisen  a  redeemer 

By  sword  or  by  song." 


HIgernon  Cbarlee  Swinburne 

During  the  fifteen  years  from  1882,  when  Rossetti 
died,  to  1896,  when  Morris  died,  English  literature 
lost  five  of  the  six  great  poets  that  had  made  the 
latter  half  of  the  century  memorable.  The  close 
of  the  nineteenth  century  found  only  one  poet  of  the 
first  rank  left  alive  among  the  English-speaking  peo- 
ples; it  is  hardly  too  much  to  say  among  all  the 
peoples  of  the  world.  The  solitary  preeminence  thus 
bestowed  upon  Swinburne  is  almost  unparalleled  in  the 
history  of  modern  literature.  Neither  in  France  nor 
in  Germany  is  there  any  poet  now  living  who  may  be 
brought  into  serious  comparison  with  him,  and  even 
the  great  poet  of  modern  Italy,  who  with  him  survived 
the  century  of  their  common  birth,  has  now  passed 
away.  The  England  of  the  present  day,  rich  as  it 
is  in  accomplished  writers  of  verse,  can  hardly 
be  said  to  possess  another  poet  entitled  either  by  gift 
or  achievement  to  dispute  with  Swinburne  his 
sovereignty  over  the  realms  of  song.  Yet  this  sover- 
eignty, which  is  not  questioned,  as  far  as  I  know,  by 
any  well-informed  and  serious  critic,  is  far  from 
being  clearly  recognised  by  the  masses  of  readers. 
The  poet  certainly  does  not  sway  them  as  they  were 
swayed  by  Byron  and  Wordsworth  and  Tennyson, 

348 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE  349 

the  phrases  of  his  mintage  have  not  passed  into  gen- 
eral currency;  the  winged  words  of  his  song  have 
not  become  domesticated  as  household  words  except 
to  a  very  limited  extent.  There  is  a  twofold  expla- 
nation of  this  fact.  It  is  explained  in  part  by  the 
nature  of  his  subject-matter,  which  has  been  far  re- 
moved from  men's  everyday  interests.  Aside  from 
his  lovely  verses  in  praise  of  childhood,  there  is  no 
considerable  group  of  his  poems  that  appeals  to  the 
common  instincts  of  domestic  life.  He  has  written 
nothing  of  the  type  of  "Maud"  or  "Enoch  Arden"  or 
"The  Princess."  Although  the  passion  of  love  counts 
for  much  in  his  work,  it  is  not  the  form  of  love  that 
Browning's  "Men  and  Women"  brings  into  such  inti- 
mate relations  with  our  own  most  vivid  personal  expe- 
riences ;  it  is  rather  the  form  that  is  coupled  with 
high  endeavour  and  heroic  energy,  with  fateful  old- 
world  histories,  with  Tristram  and  Yseult,  with  the 
Queen  of  Scots,  with  the  English  and  the  Lombard 
Rosamunds.  This  choice  of  themes,  combined  with  a 
treatment  that  allows  almost  nothing  for  sentiment, 
that  is  both  abstract  and  austere,  is  not  calculated 
to  bring  the  generality  of  readers  into  intimacy 
with  his  work;  it  requires  a  certain  strenuousness 
of  temper,  a  certain  detachment  from  the  habitual 
plane  of  life,  to  catch  the  contagion  of  his  spirit, 
to  participate  in  his  pursuit  of  lofty  and  remote 
ideals.  The  other  part  of  the  explanation  is  found 
in  the  simple  fact  that  the  general  public  has  never 
had  the  opportunity  of  becoming  acquainted  with 


350  ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

the  bulk  of  Swinburne's  writings.  He  seems  to  have 
shrunk  from  popular  applause,  much  as  Landor  did, 
and  his  books  have  been  produced  in  an  expensive 
form,  in  numerous  slender  volumes  instead  of  a  few 
comprehensive  ones.  The  reader  who  has  wished  to 
add  Swinburne's  complete  writings  to  his  library  has 
been  required,  until  recently,  to  purchase  upwards  of 
twenty  volumes  of  the  poems  alone,  and  at  least  ten 
volumes  more  of  the  prose,  at  a  price  that  has  been 
practically  prohibitive.  We  do  not  need  to  go  beyond 
this  fact  to  understand  why  he  has  never  had  his 
due  of  popular  appreciation;  he  has  been  handi- 
capped all  the  time  by  an  impediment  of  his  own  mak- 
ing. Until  the  public  is  offered  a  compact  edition 
of  his  poems,  at  least,  in  not  more  than  two  or  three 
volumes,  his  reputation  will  never  become  at  all  com- 
mensurate with  his  deserts. 

The  manner  of  his  introduction  to  the  larger  pub- 
lic was  peculiarly  unfortunate;  the  succes  d*estime 
of  his  earlier  books  was  followed  by  the  succes  de 
scandale  of  the  first  collection  of  "Poems  and  Bal- 
lads." When  that  startling  volume  was  given  to 
the  world,  he  had  already  attracted  the  attention  of 
the  discerning,  and  won  the  applause  of  the  judicious, 
by  the  first  four  of  his  dramatic  poems.  "Rosamond" 
and  "The  Queen  Mother"  had  appeared  in  1860, 
"Atalanta  in  Calydon"  and  "Chastelard"  in  1865. 
But  these  extraordinary  books  had  found  their  way  to 
no  very  wide  circle  of  readers.  A  year  later,  the 
name  of  the  poet  was  upon  the  lips  of  every  reader 


1 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE     351 

who  took  any  interest  whatever  in  poetry,  and  Swin- 
burne had  become,  if  not  the  most  popular,  certainly 
the  most  notorious,  of  living  poets.  There  had  been 
no  such  sensation  in  English  poetry  since  the  appear- 
ance of  the  first  two  books  of  "Childe  Harold"  as 
was  occasioned  by  this  famous  first  volume  of  "Poems 
and  Ballads,"  and  there  has  been  no  such  sensation 
since.  Thousands  of  young  men  got  the  poems  by 
heart  and  declaimed  them  to  each  other  upon  every 
possible  occasion.  The  reviewers  pounced  upon  the 
volume  and  waxed  unusually  virtuous  in  their  solemn 
deliberations.  The  newspapers  took  up  the  chorus 
and  brought  word  of  the  new  poet  into  the  remotest 
regions.  This  sudden  and  extraordinary  vogue  was 
the  result,  of  course,  not  of  the  magnificent  merits 
of  the  volume  as  a  whole,  but  rather  of  the  license  of 
a  few — a  very  few — of  the  pieces  which  it  contained. 
These  half-dozen  pieces,  more  or  less,  were  singled  out 
by  the  unerring  instinct  of  journalism  for  sensational 
effects,  and  the  hapless  poet  was  assailed  with  every 
form  of  denunciation  and  vituperation  in  the  arsenal 
of  the  newspaper  custodians  of  morality.  The  ani- 
mus and  the  persistence  of  this  outcry  were  such  that 
its  echoes  have  not  yet  died  away.  Even  at  the  pres- 
ent day,  there  are  thousands  of  worthy  and  well- 
meaning  people  whose  only  notion  of  Swinburne's 
poetry  is  a  reflection  of  the  feeling  aroused  a  full 
generation  ago  by  a  few  poems  full  of  the  reckless- 
ness of  boyhood,  poems  which  are  the  least  typical 
and   characteristic   of   all  his   writings.     To   these 


352    ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

people  the  poet  of  "Thalassius"  and  the  "Songs 
before  Sunrise"  still  remains  the  poet  of  morbid 
sensualism,  to  these  the  poet  who  almost  more  than 
any  of  his  fellow-singers  exalts  spirit  above  sense, 
and  transports  his  readers  to  an  atmosphere  almost 
too  rarefied  for  ordinary  mortals  to  breathe,  remains 
the  poet  of  unregulated  passion  and  defiance  of  the 
most  universally  accepted  eithical  sanctions.  Of  course 
there  were  many  critics — to  the  honour  of  our  own 
country  Richard  Grant  White  and  Edmund  Clarence 
Stedman  among  them — who  took  a  rational  view  of 
the  "Poems  and  Ballads,"  who  judged  the  volume 
upon  its  merits  instead  of  singling  out  its  defects,  and 
who  recognised  the  patent  fact  that  here  indeed  was 
a  new  poet  in  the  true  sense,  a  veritable  singer  arisen 
among  men  in  an  age  fast  lapsing  into  the  prosaic. 
Even  the  severest  of  Swinburne's  early  critics 
could  not  deny  that  he  had  the  gift  of  melody,  that 
he  played  upon  English  speech  as  a  virtuoso  plays 
upon  his  instrument,  that  he  evoked  from  our  lan- 
guage wonderful  new  rhythmical  effects  and  hitherto 
unsuspected  possibilities  of  harmony.  It  would  have 
been  a  dull  ear  indeed  that  could  remain  deaf  to 
the  music  of  "Hesperia"  and  the  "Hymn  to  Pros- 
erpine." 

"Out  of  the  golden  remote  wild  west  where  the  sea  without 
shore  is. 
Full  of  the  sunset,  and  sad,  if  at  all,  with  the  fulness  of 

joy» 

As  a  wind  sets  in  with  the  autumn  that  blows  from  the  region 
of  stories, 


1 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE  353 

Blows  with  the  perfume  of  song  and  of  memories  beloved 

from  a  boy, 
Blows  from  the  capes  of  the  past  over-sea  to  the  bays  of  the 

present, 
Filled  as  with  shadow  of  sound  with  the  pulse  of  invisible 

feet. 
Far  out  to  the  shadows  and  straits  of  the  future,  by  rough 

ways  or  pleasant, 
Is  it  thither  the  wind's  wings  beat?  is  it  thither  to  me,  O 

my  sweet?" 

Even  the  most  indignant  repudiation  of  the  poet's 
so-called  paganism  could  not  fail  to  admit  that 
paganism  was  made  very  alluring  by  such  verse 
as  this: 

"Though   before   thee   the   throned   Cytherean   be   fallen    and 

hidden  her  head. 
Yet  thy  kingdom  shall  pass,  Galilean,  thy  dead  shall  go  down 

to  thee  dead. 
Of  the  maiden  thy  mother  men  sing  as  a  goddess  with  grace 

clad  around: 
Thou  art  throned  where  another  was  king;  where  another  was 

queen  she  is  crowned. 
Yea,  once  we  had  sight  of  another;  but  now  she  is  queen,  say 

these. 
Not   as  thine,  not  as  thine  was  our  mother — a  blossom  of 

flowering  seas. 
Clothed  round  with  the  world's  desire  as  with  raiment,  and 

fair  as  the  foam. 
And  fleeter  than  kindled  fire,  and  a  goddess,  and  mother  of 

Rome, 
For  thine  came  pale  and  a  maiden,  and  sister  to  sorrow;  but 

ours 
Her  deep  hair  heavenly  laden  with  odour  and  colour  of  flowers, 
White  rose  of  the  rose-white  water,  a  silver  splendour,  a  flame. 
Bent  down  unto  us  that  besought  her,  and  earth  grew  sweet 

with  her  name." 


354  ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

The  "Hymn  to  Proserpine,"  from  which  this  cry  of 
the  pagan  spirit  is  taken,  is  probably  the  finest  poem 
in  the  collection.  If  there  be  a  finer,  it  is  perhaps 
the  poem  called  "The  Garden  of  Proserpine,"  with 
its  burden  of  utter  world-weariness,  and  its  vision  of 
the  sacred  refuge  provided  for  the  human  wanderer 
at  the  end  of  his  journey ings. 

"She  waits  for  each  and  other, 

She  waits  for  all  men  born; 
Forgets  the  earth  her  mother, 

The  life  of  fruits  and  corn; 
And  spring  and  seed  and  swallow 
Take  wing  for  her  and  follow 
Where  summer  song  rings  hollow 

And  flowers  are  put  to  scorn." 

The  sense  of  satiety,  the  deadly  languor  of  the  ex- 
hausted spirit,  the  longing  for  rest  final  and  complete 
that  at  times  takes  possession  of  most  men  and 
women,  here  finds  the  most  perfect  expression  it  has 
ever  received. 

"From  too  much  love  of  living. 

From  hope  and  fear  set  free, 
We  thank  with  brief  thanksgiving 

Whatever  gods  may  be 
That  no  life  lives  for  ever; 
That  dead  men  rise  up  never; 
That  even  the  weariest  river 

Winds  somewhere  safe  to  sea." 

It  is  of  this  poem  that  Frederic  Myers  writes : 

"There  is  here  far  more  than  the  Lucretian  satisfaction  in  the 
thought  that  we  shall  sleep  tranquilly  through  the  hazardous 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE     355 

future  as  we  slept  tranquilly  through  the  raging  past — ad 
confUgendum  venientibus  undique  Pcenis — when  all  the  perils 
which  menaced  Rome  were  as  nothing  to  us  yet  unborn.  No, 
there  is  here  a  pro  founder  renouncement  of  life;  there  is  the 
grim  suspicion  which  has  stolen  into  many  a  heart,  that  we  do  in 
truth  feel  within  us,  as  years  go  by,  a  mortality  of  spirit  as 
well  as  flesh;  that  the  'bower  of  unimagined  flower  and  tree' 
withers  inevitably  into  a  frozen  barrenness  from  which  no  new 
life  can  spring: — 

'And  love,  grown  faint  and  fretful. 
With  lips  but  half  regretful 
Sighs,  and  with  eyes  forgetful 
Weeps  that  no  loves  endure.' " 

Since  the  publication  of  the  "Poems  and  Ballads," 
few  years  have  passed  that  have  not  made  considera- 
ble additions  to  Swinburne's  verse,  hardly  any  year 
has  passed  in  which  he  has  not  published  something 
of  importance  in  either  verse  or  prose.  His  poetry 
alone  now  fills  upwards  of  a  score  of  volumes,  about 
one-half  of  them  dramatic,  the  other  half  narrative 
and  lyrical  in  content.  Of  his  dramatic  poems  we 
may  say  that  there  has  been  nothing  equal  to  them 
in  our  literature  since  "The  Cenci,"  nothing  save 
"The  Cenci"  since  the  work  of  the  Elizabethans. 
Even  the  noble  dramatic  pieces  of  Tennyson  and 
Browning  must  take  a  lower  place  than  is  occupied 
by  the  magnificent  trilogy  which  deals  with  the  for- 
tunes of  Mary  Stuart ;  Swinburne's  "Marino  Faliero" 
is  so  much  finer  than  Byron's  as  to  be  beyond  com- 
parison ;  while  his  "Atalanta"  and  his  "Erechtheus," 
if  less  great  than  "Samson  Agonistes"  considered  as 


356  ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

pure  poetry,  give  us  a  much  closer  reproduction  of 
Greek  tragedy  in  both  form  and  spirit.  In  narrative 
verse  he  has  given  us  two  splendid  works,  "Tristram 
of  Lyonesse"  and  "The  Tale  of  Balen,"  studies  in 
Arthurian  legend  more  sympathetic  and  faithful 
than  those  of  Arnold  and  Tennyson.  The  lyrical  sec- 
tion of  his  work  is  so  rich  and  varied  that  it  becomes 
almost  invidious  to  specify  particular  examples. 
There  are  odes  of  intricate  structure  and  almost  un- 
approachable harmony,  there  are  memorial  tributes 
of  matchless  grace  and  tenderness,  there  are  songs 
of  childhood  outvying  in  loveliness  the  best  of  their 
kind,  there  are  poems  of  the  sea  such  as  no  other 
English  poet  has  written,  there  are  ballads  which 
have  caught  the  very  accent  of  old-time  minstrelsy, 
and  there  are  such  memorable  compositions  as 
"Siena"  and  "Thalassius"  and  "The  Last  Oracle" 
and  "The  Hymn  of  Man"  and  "Ave  atque  Vale"  and 
the  matchless  group  of  lyrics  "By  the  North  Sea." 
To  dwell  upon  the  poet's  metrical  craft,  upon  his 
unparalleled  mastery  of  the  resources  of  English 
song,  of  its  hitherto  half-hidden  possibilities  of  mel- 
ody and  harmony,  would  be  a  superfluous  task,  even 
were  it  within  the  scope  of  my  present  purpose.  This 
quality  of  Swinburne's  poetry  "leaps  to  the  eye"  of 
the  dullest  critic ;  unfortunately  there  are  many  crit- 
ics who  have  never  got  beyond  the  discovery  of  this 
quality,  or  who,  offended  by  the  ideas  of  the  poet's 
inculcation,  have  pretended  to  discover  in  his  work 
little  more  than  so  much  meaningless  verbiage.     The 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE     357 

reader  is  apt,  no  doubt,  to  be  at  first  somewhat  dazed 
by  the  affluence  of  Swinburne's  poetic  diction,  and  to 
lose  sight  of  the  meaning  which  it  conceals  from  care- 
less observation.  And  there  is  some  slight  degree  of 
truth,  although  far  too  much  has  been  made  of  it,  in 
Mr.  Saintsbury's  statement  when  he  says  of  the  poet 
that  "his  extraordinary  command  of  metre  has  led 
him  to  make  new  and  ever  new  experiments  in  it  which 
have  been  too  often  mere  tours  de  force,  to  plan  sea- 
serpents  in  verse  in  order  to  show  how  easily  and 
gracefully  he  can  make  them  coil  and  uncoil  their 
enormous  length,  to  build  mastodons  of  metre  that 
we  may  admire  the  proportion  and  articulation  of 
their  mighty  limbs."  The  same  critic  says  elsewhere, 
with  no  more  than  simple  truth,  that  "the  verse  does 
not  merely  run,  it  spins,  gyrating  and  revolving  in 
itself  as  well  as  proceeding  in  its  orbit:  the  wave 
as  it  rushes  on  has  eddies  and  backwaters  of  live 
interior  movement.  All  the  metaphors  and  similes 
of  water,  light,  wind,  fire,  all  the  modes  of  motion, 
inspire  and  animate  this  astonishing  poetry."  But 
with  all  its  verbal  magic,  there  is  meaning  enough 
and  to  spare  in  Swinburne's  verse,  as  I  trust  will  be 
shown  further  on.  Meanwhile  we  may  take  a  single 
illustration  of  his  supremacy  as  a  metrical  artist. 
It  has  been  said  that  he  restored  the  anapaest 
to  English  poetry.  And  where,  in  English  po- 
etry or  any  other,  may  be  found  a  match  to 
the  anapaestic  roll  of  the  closing  chorus  of  "Erech- 
theus".? 


358  ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

"From  the  depth  of  the  springs  of  my  spirit  a   fomitain  is 
poured  of  thanksgiving, 

My  country,  my  mother,  for  thee. 
That  thy  dead  for  their  death  shall  have  life  in  thy  sight  and 
a  name  ever  living 

At  heart  of  thy  people  to  be. 
In  the  darkness  of  change  on  the  waters  of  time  they  shall 

turn  from  afar 
To  the  beam  of  this  dawn  for  a  beacon,  the  light  of  these 

pyres  for  a  star. 
They  shall  see  thee  who  love  and  take  comfort,  who  hate  thee 
shall  see  and  take  warning. 

Our  mother  that  makest  us  free; 
And  the  sons  of  thine  earth  shall  have  help  of  the  waves  that 
made  war  on  their  morning, 

And  friendship  and  fame  of  the  sea." 


Swinburne's  prose  is  so  considerable  in  amount  and 
so  rich  in  content  that,  were  he  not  so  much  greater 
as  a  poet,  it  would  still  mark  him  as  one  of  the  intel- 
lectual forces  of  his  age.  But  being  primarily  a 
poet,  his  prose  suffers  neglect,  and  readers  in  general 
have  not  yet  discovered  that  it  is  comparable  in 
importance  with  the  prose  of  Carlyle.  With  that 
prose  it  has,  indeed,  several  things  in  common.  It 
is  no  less  distinctive  and  impressive  in  its  individu- 
ahty,  and  no  less  detestable  as  a  model  of  what  prose 
ought  to  be.  In  the  case  of  both  writers,  prose  be- 
comes an  instrument  of  great  power,  but  the  instru- 
ment is  one  that  their  followers  should  beware  of 
seeking  to  grasp.  In  both  cases  a  crotchety  and 
turgid  style  is  made  use  of  to  impart  real  ideas,  and 
becomes  the  vehicle  of  a  moral  fervour  that  verges 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE  359 

upon  the  prophetic.  Swinburne's  prose  is,  of  course, 
so  largely  concerned  with  the  criticism  of  literature 
that  its  opportunities  are  restricted,  but  this  does  not 
prevent  it  from  throwing  side-lights  upon  many  sub- 
jects of  other  than  literary  interest,  or  from  stimu- 
lating the  whole  intellectual  life  rather  than  that 
section  of  it  which  is  preoccupied  with  questions  of 
taste  and  the  fitness  of  literary  form  to  subserve 
their  respectiA^e  ends.  Swinburne's  prose  certainly 
commands  attention  upon  its  own  account,  and  not 
merely  the  attention  one  is  inclined  to  give  it  as 
the  work  of  a  poet.  Considered  as  a  critic  of  litera- 
ture, I  think  that  Swinburne  is  entitled  to  a  very  high 
place.  His  involved  manner  of  saying  things,  and 
the  extravagance  of  the  praise  which  he  sometimes 
bestows,  are  but  incidental  defects,  after  all,  and 
should  not  be  allowed  to  obscure  the  very  real  and 
solid  merits  of  his  analysis.  I  know  of  no  more  help- 
ful and  stimulating  book  to  place  in  the  hands  of  a 
reader  of  Shakespeare  than  Swinburne's  study  of 
the  greatest  of  poets.  It  will  do  for  the  student  pre- 
cisely what  a  whole  library  of  scientific  criticism  will 
not  do ;  it  will  save  him  from  mechanical  methods  of 
judgment  and  all  the  deadening  influences  of  pedan- 
try; it  will  impart  to  him  something  of  its  own  gen- 
erous enthusiasm  and  genial  insight.  It  will,  in 
short,  by  the  very  contagion  of  its  spirit,  do  more  to 
make  a  student  feel  the  power  and  beauty  of  Shakes- 
peare than  can  be  done  by  all  the  heavy  tomes  of 
the   Germans.      What    Swinburne   calls   "the   noble 


360    ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

pleasure  of  praising"  is  certainly  one  of  the  most 
important  functions  of  criticism,  and  if  he  sometimes 
over-emphasises  this  function,  shall  it  not  be  imputed 
to  him  for  righteousness  in  an  age  when  the  tendency 
of  criticism,  and  of  literary  scholarship,  in  general, 
runs  too  far  in  the  direction  of  historical  explanation 
and  dispassionate  analysis?  What  I  have  said  of 
Swinburne's  "Study  of  Shakespeare"  applies  with 
comparable  validity  to  his  studies  of  Jonson  and 
Chapman,  which  also  exist  as  separate  books,  and 
to  the  long  series  of  his  essays  upon  the  other  Eliza- 
bethan dramatists.  I  doubt  if  any  other  critic  has 
done  as  much  for  the  true  appreciation  of  the  poetry 
of  our  great  dramatic  period;  certainly  no  one  has 
discussed  that  poetry  with  warmer  sympathy  or 
deeper  insight.  We  owe  not  a  little  to  Swinburne 
for  the  example  he  sets  against  that  complacent  criti- 
cism which  is  far  too  commonly  met  with.  There  is 
no  doubt  that  catholicity  can  be  carried  too  far 
here  as  elsewhere,  and  that  a  critic  is  often  forced 
to  attack  by  the  very  nature  of  what  he  defends.  It 
is  probably  true  that  Swinburne  is  too  vehement  when 
he  does  feel  impelled  to  attack  any  one,  but  no  one 
can  deny  that  the  preponderance  of  his  critical  work 
is  upon  the  side  of  generous  praise  of  the  excellences 
discerned  by  him.  Serious  objection  has  been  made 
to  the  way  in  which  his  critical  studies  sometimes 
attack  eminent  writers ;  these  are  the  words  with 
which  he  meets  the  objection:  "All  belief  involves  or 
implies  a  corresponding  disbelief;  it  is  impossible,  if 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE     361 

words  have  any  meaning,  for  any  one  who  under- 
stands that  meaning  to  assert  that  he  believes  in  orig- 
inal sin,  or  the  infernal  predestination  of  unregener- 
ate  or  unchristened  infancy,  and  in  the  same  breath 
to  proclaim  his  belief  in  the  divine  word  which  affirms 
that  of  such  as  unchristened  and  unregenerate  chil- 
dren is  the  kingdom  of  heaven."  For  the  harshness 
with  which  he  assails  certain  distinguished  wr'ters,  he 
defends  himself  in  these  terms: 

"We  may  heartily  appreciate,  we  may  cordially  admire,  the 
literary  and  personal  energies  of  such  writers  as  Byron  and 
Carlyle;  but  we  must  recognise  that  the  man  who  sees  a  great 
poet  in  the  histrionic  rhapsodist  to  whom  all  great  poetry  was 
hateful,  or  a  great  philosophic  and  political  teacher  in  the 
passionate  and  distempered  humorist  whose  religious  ideal  was 
a  modified  Moloch  worship,  and  whose  political  creed  found 
practical  expression  in  the  plantations  of  a  slave-owner  and  the 
dungeons  of  a  czar,  does  rightly  or  wrongly  accept  and  respect 
the  pretensions  of  writers  who  can  be  acceptable  as  prophets  or 
respectable  as  teachers  to  no  man  who  accepts  the  traditions  of 
English  independence  or  respects  the  inheritance  of  English 
poetry." 

Yet,  however  just  this  defence  may  be  as  far  as  it 
goes,  it  cannot  be  denied  that  Swinburne,  by  singling 
out  and  laying  undue  stress  upon  the  objectionable 
characteristics  of  such  writers  as  these,  gives  but  a 
distorted  idea  of  their  work  and  their  lives.  That 
Shelley  was  a  far  greater  and  truer  poet  than  Byron 
seems  to  me  a  matter  so  well  assured  that  I  can  only 
account  for  failure  to  recognise  it  as  due  to  some  in- 
curable defect  of  sense,  but  I  do  not  think  that  this 
position  is  fortified  by  Swinburne's  array  of  abusive 


S62    ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

terms  applied  to  the  verse  and  the  character  of 
Bjron.  In  this  and  a  few  other  instances  he  cer- 
tainly gets  far  away  from  that  "noble  pleasure  of 
praising"  which  the  greater  part  of  his  criticism  so 
amply  illustrates. 

Delight  in  the  sea  and  pride  in  the  fame  of  Eng- 
land are  two  motives  that  can  always  be  counted  upon 
to  evoke  from  this  poet  his  most  ringing  and  exultant 
strains.  In  his  great  choral  ode  to  "Athens,"  the 
sea  fight  with  the  Persians  is  given  an  added  glory 
by  its  suggestion  of  the  sea  fight  with  the  Spaniards 
two  thousand  years  later. 

"Sons  of  Athens  born  in  spirit  and  truth  are  all  born  freemen; 
Most  of  all,  we,  nurtured  where  the  north  wind  holds  his 
reign ! 
Children  all  we  sea-folk  of  the  Salaminian  seamen. 

Sons  of  them  that  beat  back  Persia  they  that  beat  back" 
Spain. 
Since  the  songs  of  Greece  fell  silent,  none  like  ours  have  risen ; 
Since  the  sails  of  Greece  fell  slack,  no  ships  have  sailed  like 
ours; 
How  should  we  lament  not,  if  her  spirit  sit  in  prison? 
How   should   we   rejoice   not,   if  her  wreaths   renew  their 
flowers  ?" 

In  the  tercentenary  of  the  defeat  of  the  Spanish 
Armada,  Swinbunie  found  a  subject  that  enUsted  his 
noblest  sympathies,  and  produced  one  of  the  greatest 
of  his  patriotic  poems.  The  far-reaching  conse- 
quences and  the  tremendous  significance  of  the  vic- 
tory won  by  England  and  the  sea  over  Spain,  in 
that  summer  of  1588,  are  here  brought  home  to  the 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE     363 

mind  as  by  no  other  description  of  the  event  in  our 
Hterature.  I  quote  from  the  paean  of  victory  with 
which  the  poem  closes. 


"England,  queen   of  the  waves  whose  green  inviolate  girdle 

enrings  thee  round. 
Mother  fair  as  the  morning,  where  is  now  the  place  of  thy 

foemen  found? 
Still  the   sea  that  salutes  us   free  proclaims  them  stricken, 

acclaims  thee  crowned. 
Times  may  change,  and  the  skies  grow  strange  with  signs  of 

treason  and  fraud  and  fear; 
Foes  in  union  of  strange  communion  may  rise  against  thee 

from  far  and  near: 
Sloth  and  greed  on  thy  strength  may  feed  as  cankers  waxing 

from  year  to  year. 
Yet,  though  treason  and  fierce  unreason  should  league  and  lie 

and  defame  and  smite. 
We  that  know  thee,  how  far  below  thee  the  hatred  burns  of  the 

sons  of  night, 
We  that  love  thee,  behold  above  thee  the  witness  written  of 

life  in  light. 


Mother,  mother  beloved,  none  other  could  claim  in  place  of 

thee  England's  place: 
Earth  bears  none  that  beholds  the  sun  so  pure  of  record,  so 

clothed  with  grace: 
Dear  our  mother,  nor  son  nor  brother  is  thine,  as  strong  or  as 

fair  of  face. 
How  shalt  thou  be  abased?  or  how  shall  fear  take  hold  of  thy 

heart?  of  thine, 
England,  maiden  immortal,  laden  with  charge  of  life  and  with 

hopes  divine? 
Earth  shall  wither,  when  eyes  turned  hither  behold  not  light  in 

her  darkness  shine. 


364  ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

England,  none  that  is  bom  thy  son,  and  lives,  by  grace  of  thy 

glory,  free. 
Lives  and  yearns  not  at  heart  and  burns  with  hope  to  serve 

as  he  worships  thee; 
None  may   sing  thee:  the   sea-wind's   wing  beats   down  our 

song  as  it  hails  the  sea." 

For  the  last  thirty  or  forty  years,  Swinburne  has 
been  a  close  observer  of  passing  events  in  the  world 
of  society  and  of  politics,  and  no  inconsiderable  por- 
tion of  his  poetry  has  found  its  inspiration  in  current 
happenings.  Sometimes  with  scorn,  sometimes  with 
bitter  iron}^  and  sometimes  with  fierce  and  splendid 
indignation,  the  torrent  of  his  song  has  been  poured 
out  upon  men  and  measures  and  ideas  that  have 
seemed  to  liim  deserving  of  reprobation.  The  scorn 
may  be  illustrated  by  this  sonnet  upon  ''The  Moder- 
ates"— the  weak  and  timorous  souls  in  France  who 
were  willing,  in  the  last  days  of  the  Empire,  to  make 
terms  with  tyranny  and  to  compromise  with  cor> 
ruption. 

"She  stood  before  her  traitors  bound  and  bare. 

Clothed  with  her  wounds  and  \\ith  her  naked  shame 
As  with  a  weed  of  fiery  tears  and  flame, 
Their  mother-land,  their  common  weal  and  care. 
And  they  turned  from  her  and  denied,  and  sware 
They  did  not  know  this  woman  nor  her  name. 
And  they  took  truce  with  tj'rants  and  grew  tame, 
And  gathered  up  cast  crowns  and  creeds  to  wear. 
And  rags  and  shards  regilded.    Then  she  took 
In  her  bruised  hands  their  broken  pledge,  and  eyed 
Those  men  so  late  so  loud  upon  her  side 
With  one  inevitable  and  tearless  look. 
That  they  might  see  her  face  whom  they  forsook; 
And  they  beheld  what  they  had  left,  and  died." 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE  365 

Of  the  bitterness  of  the  irony  at  his  command  there 
is  no  better  illustration  than  is  afforded  by  a  series 
of  sonnets  which  chant  "The  Conservative  Journal- 
ist's Anthem."  At  the  time  when  Tennyson  accepted 
a  peer's  title,  there  was  a  good  deal  of  ill-natured 
comment  upon  the  act.  Radical  critics  fairly  foamed 
at  the  mouth  at  what  they  were  pleased  to  consider 
the  degradation  involved  in  this  acceptance.  They 
seemed  incapable  of  understanding  that  the  honour 
was  bestowed  in  all  good  faith,  and  that  it  would 
have  been  the  merest  boorishness  to  refuse  it.  In 
this  discussion,  The  Saturday  Review^  that  staunch 
defender  of  crusted  conservatism,  delivered  itself  of 
the  following  unguarded  opinion:  "As  a  matter  of 
fact,  no  man  living,  or  who  ever  lived — not  Caesar 
or  Pericles,  not  Shakespeare  or  Michael  Angelo — 
could  confer  honour  more  than  he  took  on  entering 
the  House  of  Lords."  Here  was  an  opportunity  not 
to  be  missed  by  the  poet-satirist,  of  whose  three  son- 
nets upon  the  subject  the  following  is  the  first  and 
best: 

"O  Lords  our  Gods,  beneficent,  sublime. 

In  the  evening,  and  before  the  morning  flames, 
We  praise,  we  bless,  we  magnify  your  names. 
The  slave  is  he  that  serves  not,  his  the  crime 
And  shame,  who  hails  not  as  the  crown  of  Time 
That  House  wherein  the  all-envious  world  acclaims 
Such  glory  that  the  reflex  of  it  shames 
All  crowns  bestowed  of  men  for  prose  or  rhyme. 
The  serf,  the  cur,  the  sycophant,  is  he 
Who  feels  no  cringing  motion  twitch  his  knee 


366    ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

When  from  a  height  too  high  for  Shakespere  nods 
The  wearer  of  a  higher  than  Milton's  crown. 
Stoop,  Chaucer,  stoop ;  Keats,  Shelley,  Burns,  bow  down; 

These  have  no  part  with  you,  O  Lords  our  Gods." 

Of  the  fierceness  of  his  indignation,  which  equals 
that  of  Tacitus  or  of  Swift,  of  Juvenal  or  of  Hugo, 
those  terrible  sonnets  called  "Dirae"  stand  as  last- 
ing monuments.  They  are  almost  too  terrible  to 
quote,  but  I  will  give  one  of  the  two  that  describe 
"The  Descent  into  Hell"  of  that  modem  saviour  of 
society,  Napoleon  the  Little,  the  cynical  and  sinister 
Man  of  December. 

"What  shapes  are  these  and  shadows  without  end 
That  fill  the  night  full  as  a  storm  of  rain 
With  myriads  of  dead  men  and  women  slain, 
Old  with  young,  child  with  mother,  friend  with  friend, 
That  on  the  deep  mid  wintering  air  impend, 
Pale  yet  with  mortal  wrath  and  human  pain. 
Who  died  that  this  man  dead  now  too  might  reign, 
Toward  whom  their  hands  point  and  their  faces  bend? 
The  ruining  flood  would  redden  earth  and  air 
If  for  each  soul  whose  guiltless  blood  was  shed 
There  fell  but  one  drop  on  this  man's  head 
Whose  soul  to-night  stands  bodiless  and  bare. 
For  whom  our  hearts  give  thanks  who  put  up  prayer, 
That  we  have  lived  to  say,  The  dog  is  dead." 

It  may  be  said  that  such  vehemence  of  utterance  de- 
feats its  own  purpose,  that  a  more  restrained  expres- 
sion would  also  be  more  effective.  But,  however 
uncomfortably  we  may  be  stirred  by  the  intensity  of 
the  poet's  emotion,  it  must  be  observed  that  his  lack 
of  restraint  does  not  extend  to  the  artistic  form 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE  367 

of  his  expression,  for  that  is  as  flawless  as  if  it  were 
concerned  with  the  gentlest  and  least  passionate  of 
themes.  And  there  ar9  many  who,  considering  the 
deep  wrongs  that  engaged  his  eloquence,  will  find  in 
the  poet's  own  closing  "Apologia"  the  sufficient  justi- 
fication of  his  most  intemperate  speech. 

"If  wrath  embitter  the  sweet  mouth  of  song, 
And  make  the  sunlight  fire  before  those  eyes 
That  would  drink  draughts  of  peace  from  the  unsoilcd 
skies, 
The  wrongdoing  is  not  ours,  but  ours  the  wrong. 
Who  hear  too  loud  on  earth  and  see  too  long 

The  grief  that  dies  not  with  the  groan  that  dies. 
Till  the  strong  bitterness  of  pity  cries 
Within  us,  that  our  anger  should  be  strong." 

The  heat  of  the  poet's  indignation  is  matched  by  the 
warmth  of  his  praise.  Such  tributes  as  he  has  paid 
to  the  great  apostles  and  champions  of  human  free- 
dom have  a  generosity  and  enthusiasm  of  apprecia- 
tion elsewhere  unequalled  in  panegyric  poetry.  How 
he  has  sung  the  praises  of  Cromwell  and  Milton,  of 
Shelley  and  Landor,  of  Hugo  and  Mazzini,  is  well 
known  to  all  of  his  readers.  Mazzini,  in  particular, 
has  always  been  the  god  of  his  idolatry,  and  Swin- 
burne, in  helping  us  to  understand  the  supreme  im- 
portance of  Mazzini's  share  in  the  regeneration  of 
Italy,  has  done  what  the  historians  have  signally 
failed  in  doing.  "It  is  well  for  the  world,"  says 
Frederic  Myers,  "that  the  representative,  for  poetry 
even  more  than  for  history,  of  the  last  great  strug- 
gle where  all  chivalrous  sympathies  could  range  them- 


S68    ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

selves  undoubtinglj  on  one  side,  should  have  received 
a  crown  of  song  such  as  had  scarcely  before  been  laid 
at  the  feet  of  any  living  hero."  I  need  hardly  recall 
the  beautiful  dedication  to  Mazzini  of  the  "Songs 
before  Sunrise,"  the  magnificent  paean  of  "A  Song  of 
Italy,"  or  the  exquisite  verses  written  for  the  Monu- 
ment at  Genoa. 

"Not  his  own  heavenly  tongue  hath  heavenly  speech 
Enough  to  say 
What  this  man  was,  whose  praise  no  thought  may  reach. 
No  words  can  weigh. 

"Since  man's  first  mother  brought  to  mortal  birth 
Her  first-born  son, 
Such  grace  befell  not  ever  man  on  earth 
As  crowns  this  one. 

"Of  God  nor  man  was  ever  this  thing  said, 
That  he  could  give 
Life  back  to  her  who  gave  him,  whence  his  dead 
Mother  might  live. 

"But  this  man  found  his  mother  dead  and  slain. 
With  fast  sealed  eyes. 
And  bade  the  dead  rise  up  and  live  again. 
And  she  did  rise: 

"And  all  the  world  was  bright  with  her  through  him: 

But  dark  with  strife, 
Like  heaven's  own  sun  that  storming  clouds  bedim. 

Was  all  his  Ufe.  ^-'^'V^ 

-  j-^ 
"Life  and  the  clouds  are  vanished:  ^"jte  and  fear 
Have  had  their  span 
Of  time  to  hurt,  and  are  not:  he  is  here, 
The  sunlike  man. 


o'i 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE  369 

"City  superb  that  hadst  Columbus  first 
For  sovereign  son. 
Be  prouder  that  thy  breast  hath  later  nurst 
This  mightier  one. 

"Glory  be  his  for  ever,  while  his  land 

Lives  and  is  free. 
As  with  controlling  breath  and  sovereign  hand 
He  bade  her  be. 

"Earth  shows  to  heaven  the  names  by  thousands  told 
That  crown  her  fame, 
But  highest  of  all  that  heaven  and  earth  behold 
Mazzini's  name." 

More  enduring  even  than  the  marble  of  the  Genoese 
Monument  are  those  "Songs  before  Sunrise"  of  which 
Mazzini  and  the  cause  to  which  he  dedicated  his  life 
were  the  inspiration.  I  doubt  if  a  greater  than  this 
volume  of  lyrics  can  be  found  elsewhere  in  English 
poetry.  Such  rich  and  varied  utterance,  such  pas- 
sion of  love  and  scorn,  such  expression  of  the  most 
exalted  idealism,  was  never  before  found,  it  seems  to 
me,  nor  has  ever  since  been  found,  in  such  spontaneity 
of  flow  and  amplitude  of  stream,  within  the  limits  of 
any  single  volume  of  verse.  It  is  here  that  we  find 
Swinburne  at  his  best,  it  is  here  that  we  learn  clearly 
ead  his  title  to  a  place  among  the  greatest  of 
3h  poets.  From  dedication  to  epilogue,  in  all 
score  pieces,  some  of  them  of  great  length, 
we  fir  ^  hardly  a  jariixig  note,  hardly  a  discordant 
strain;  iLc  volume  is  one  unbroken  series  of  master- 
pieces, having  a  sweep  and  an  energy  and  a  harmony 


370  ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

that  set  them  among  the  highest  achievements  of 
lyrical  inspiration.  It  is  in  this  volume  that  we  find 
such  poems  as  "The  Eve  of  Revolution,"  "The  Lit- 
any of  Nations,"  "Mater  Dolorosa,"  "Mater  Tri- 
umphalis,"  "Tiresias,"  and  "A  Marching  Song," 
with  their  prophetic  vision  of  the  Republic  victo- 
rious ;  it  is  in  this  volume  that  we  find  "Hertha"  and 
the  "Hymn  of  Man,"  with  their  glorified  pantheism; 
it  is  in  this  volume  that  we  find  "The  Pilgrims" 
and  "Super  Flumina  Babylonis,"  with  their  exalted 
ethical  ideal  and  their  appeal  to  the  soul  to  make 
the  most  complete  sacrifice  of  self,  to  endure  and  to 
suffer  all  things,  rather  than  fail  in  pursuit  of  "the 
light  whereby  we  run  with  girdled  loins  our  lampht 
race,"  rather  than  fail  in  utter  devotion  to  our 
"lady  of  love"  "who  is  tender  and  swift  to  save," 
who  hath  for  gifts  to  us  only  these — 

"That  whoso  hath  seen  her  shall  not  live 
Except  he  serve  her  sorrowing,  with  strange  pain, 
Travail  and  bloodshedding  and  bitterer  tears; 
And  when  she  bids  die  he  shall  surely  die. 
And  he  shall  leave  all  things  under  the  sky 
And  go  forth  naked  under  sun  and  rain 

And  work  and  wait  and  watch  out  all  his  years.** 

The  love  of  Italy  has  been  a  common  possession  of 
nearly  all  our  nineteenth-century  poets,  and  hardly 
one  of  them  has  failed  to  give  eloquent  expression  to 
this  feehng.  But  Swinburne  has  surpassed  all  the 
rest  in  the  ardour  of  his  devotion,  and  in  the  rap- 
turous utterance  of  his  praise. 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE  371 

"The  very  thought  in  us  how  much  we  love  thee 
Makes  the  throat  sob  with  love  and  blinds  the  eyes," 

he  says,  and  at  the  thought  of  her  almost-accom- 
pHshed  freedom  from  the  bonds  of  domestic  and  for- 
eign oppression  he  is  inspired  to  sing, 

"All  things  are  glad  because  of  her,  but  we 

Most  glad,  who  loved  her  when  the  worst  days  were. 

O  sweetest,  fairest,  first, 

O  flower,  when  times  were  worst, 
Thou  hadst  no  stripe  wherein  we  had  no  share. 

Have  not  our  hearts  held  close. 

Kept  fast  the  whole  world's  rose? 
Have  we  not  worn  thee  at  heart  whom  none  would  wear? 

First  love  and  last  love,  light  of  lands. 
Shall  we  not  touch  thee  full-blown  with  our  lips  and  hands  ?" 

Swinburne  has  always  been  an  avowed  republican, 
his  ideal  of  republicanism  being  that  of  Milton  and 
Landor  and  Mazzini  rather  than  that  of  the  spokes- 
men of  modern  democracy.  It  is  such  a  repubHc,  a 
commonwealth  in  which  men  shall  be  wise  enough  to 
trust  those  whom  they  have  exalted  to  leadership,  in 
which  a  recognition  of  the  duties  of  man  shall  be 
reckoned  of  more  importance  than  a  clamorous  in- 
sistence upon  his  rights,  that  he  invokes  in  these 
lines : 

"O  our  Republic  that  shalt  bind  in  bands 

The  kingdomless  far  lands 
And  link  the  chainless  ages;  thou  that  wast 

With  England  ere  she  passed 
Among  the  faded  nations,  and  shalt  be 

Again,  when  sea  to  sea 


372  ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

Calls  through  the  wind  and  light  of  morning  time. 

And  throneless  clime  to  clime 
Makes  antiphonal  answer;  thou  that  art 

Where  one  man's  perfect  heart 
Burns,  one  man's  brow  is  brightened  for  thy  sake. 

Thine,  strong  to  make  or  break." 

It  is  this  republic  that  he  pictures  as  Mater  Dolorosa, 
sitting  in  rent  raiment  by  the  wild  wayside — • 

"This  is  she  for  whose  sake  being  fallen,  for  whose  abject  sake. 
Earth  groans  in  the  blackness  of  darkness,  and  men's  hearts 

break. 
This  is  she  for  whose  love,  having  seen  her,  the  men  that  were 
Poured  life  out  as  water,  and  shed  their  souls  upon  air. 
This  is  she  for  whose  glory  their  years  were  counted  as  foam; 
Whose  face  was  a  light  upon  Greece,  was  a  fire  upon  Rome.'* 

This  is  also  the  republic  that  he  pictures  as  Mater 
Triumphalis,  at  last  no  longer  rejected  of  men,  but 
enthroned  forever  in  their  hearts. 

"The  years  are  as  thy  garments,  the  world's  ages 
As  sandals  bound  and  loosed  from  thy  swift  feet; 
Time  serves  before  thee,  as  one  that  hath  for  wages 
Praise  or  shame  only,  bitter  words  or  sweet. 

"Thou  sayest  *Well  done,'  and  all  a  century  kindles; 

Again  thou  sayest  'Depart  from  sight  of  me,' 
And  all  the  light  of  face  of  all  men  dwindles. 
And  the  age  is  as  the  broken  glass  of  thee. 


"Thou  art  the  player  whose  organ-keys  are  thunders, 
And  I  beneath  thy  foot  the  pedal  prest; 
Thou  art  the  ray  whereat  the  rent  night  sunders, 
And  I  the  cloudlet  borne  upon  thy  breast. 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE  373 

"I  shall  burn  up  before  thee,  pass  and  perish, 
As  haze  in  sunrise  on  the  red  sea-line; 
But  thou  from  dawn  to  sunsetting  shalt  cherish 
The  thoughts  that  led  and  souls  that  lighted  mine." 

And  it  is  this  republic  that  he  has  in  mind  in  his 
vision  of  the  spirit  of  Liberty,  standing  over  a  corpse- 
Hke  England — perinde  ac  cadaver — and  pronounc- 
ing stern  and  deliberate  judgment. 

"Freeman  he  is  not,  but  slave. 

Who  stands  not  out  on  my  side; 
His  own  hand  hollows  his  grave, 
Nor  strength  is  in  me  to  save 
Where  strength  is  none  to  abide. 

"Time  shall  tread  on  his  name 

That  was  written  for  honour  of  old. 

Who  hath  taken  in  change  for  fame 

Dust,  and  silver,  and  shame. 
Ashes,  and  iron,  and  gold." 

Swinburne's  religious  attitude  is  that  of  one  who 
resolutely  rejects  all  dogmas  and  historical  creeds, 
and  with  equal  earnestness  clings  to  the  divine  idea 
that  lies  beneath  the  creeds  and  bestows  upon  them 
their  vitality.  He  draws  the  same  sharp  contrast 
that  is  drawn  by  Shelley  and  Hugo  between  the  eter- 
nal spirit  of  Christianity  and  its  historical  associa- 
tions. In  that  terrible  poem,  "Before  a  Crucifix,"  he 
addresses  the  emblem  of  faith  in  such  words  as  these : 

"The  nineteenth  wave  of  the  ages  rolls 

Now  deathward  since  thy  death  and  birth. 
Hast  thou  fed  full  men's  starved-out  souls? 
Hast  thou  brought  freedom  upon  earth? 


374  ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

Or  are  there  less  oppressions  done 
In  this  wild  world  under  the  sun? 


"This  dead  God  here  against  my  face 
Hath  help  for  no  man;  who  hath  seen 
The  good  works  of  it,  or  such  grace 

As  thy  grace  in  it,  Nazarene, 
As  that  from  thy  live  lips  which  ran 
For  man's  sake,  O  thou  son  of  man? 

"The  tree  of  faith  ingraffed  by  priests 
Puts  its  foul  foliage  out  above  thee, 
And  round  it  feed  man-eating  beasts 

Because  of  whom  we  dare  not  love  thee, 
Though  hearts  reach  back  and  memories  ache, 
We  cannot  praise  thee  for  their  sake." 

In  that  even  more  terrible  poem,  the  "Hymn  of  Man," 
the  god  of  superstition,  whose  empire  has  no  other 
foundation  than  that  of  terror  and  cruelty,  is  thus 
apostrophised : 

"O  thou  that  hast  built  thee  a  shrine  of  the  madness  of  man  and 

his  shame, 
And  hast  hung  in  the  midst  for  a  sign  of  his  worship  the  lamp 

of  thy  name; 
That  hast  shown  him  for  heaven  in  a  vision  a  void  world's 

shadow  and  shell. 
And  hast  fed  thy  delight  and  derision  with  fire  of  belief  as  of 

hell; 
That  hast  fleshed  on  the  souls  that  believed  thee  the  fang  of 

the  death  worm  fear, 
With  anguish  of  dreams  to  deceive  them  whose  faith  cries  out 

in  thine  ear; 
By  the  face  of  the  spirit  confounded  before  thee  and  humbled 

in  dust. 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE  375 

By  the  dread  wherewith  life  was  astounded  and  shamed  out 

of  sense  of  its  trust, 
By  the  scourges  of  doubt  and  repentance  that  fell  on  the  soul 

at  thy  nod, 
Thou  art  judged,  O  judge,  and  the  sentence  is  gone  forth 

against  thee,  O  God. 
Thy  slave  that  slept  is  awake;  thy  slave  but  slept  for  a  span; 
Yea,  man  thy  slave  shall  unmake  thee,  who  made  thee  lord  over 

man. 
For  his  face  is  set  to  the  east,  his  feet  on  the  past  and  its 

dead; 
The  sun  rearisen  is  his  priest,  and  the  heat  thereof  hallows  his 

head. 
His  eyes  take  part  in  the  morning;  his  spirit  outsounding  the 

sea 
Asks  no  more  witness  or  warning  from  temple  or  tripod  or 

tree. 
He  hath  set  the  centuries  at  union;  the  night  is  afraid  at  his 

name; 
Equal  with  life,  in  communion  with  death,  he  hath  found  them 

the  same. 
Past  the  wall  unsurmounted  that  bars  out  our  vision  with  iron 

and  fire 
He  hath  sent  forth  his  soul  for  the  stars  to  comply  with  and 

suns  to  conspire. 
His  thought  takes  flight  for  the  centre  wherethrough  it  hath 

part  in  the  whole; 
The  abysses  forbid  it  not  enter:  the  stars  make  room  for  the 

soul!" 


It  is  in  the  same  poem  that  expression  is  given  to 
what  may  be  called,  for  want  of  a  better  name, 
Swinburne's  pantheism,  that  God-intoxicated  con- 
ception of  the  universe  which  penetrates  beneath  the 
distinction  of  subject  and  object,  the  distinction  even 
of  Creator  and  created,  and  rests  upon  the  idea  of 


376    ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

the  underlying  unity,  the  idea  of  God  everywhere 
immanent  in  nature. 

"Therefore  the  God  that  ye  make  you  is  grievous,  and  gives  not 

aid. 
Because  it  is  but  for  your  sake  that  the  God  of  your  making 

is  made. 
Thou  and  I  and  he  are  not  Gods  made  men  for  a  span. 
But  God,  if  a  God  there  be,  is  the  substance  of  men  which  is 

man. 
Our  lives  are  as  pulses  or  pores  of  his  manifold  body  and 

breath ; 
As  waves  of  his  sea  on  the  shores  where  birth  is  the  beacon  of 

death. 
We  men,  the  multiform  features  of  man,  whatsoever  we  be. 
Recreate  him  of  whom  we  are  creatures,  and  all  we  only  are 

he. 
For  each  man  of  all  men  is  God,  but  God  is  the  fruit  of  the 

whole ; 
Indivisible  spirit  and  blood,  indiscernible  body  from  souL" 

Swinburne  made  sport,  in  an  ingenious  parody,  of 
Tennyson's  "Higher  Pantheism,"  but  his  own  panthe- 
ism is  quite  as  high,  and  even  more  pronounced.  Its 
clearest  expression  occurs  in  the  poem  "Hertha," 
which  is  very  perplexing  to  the  type  of  mind  which 
finds  a  stumbling-block  in  Emerson's  "Brahma," 
but  which  is  lucid  enough  in  its  meaning  to  those 
who  know  their  Goethe  and  their  Spinoza. 

"I  am  that  which  began; 

Out  of  me  the  years  roll; 
Out  of  me  God  and  man; 
I  am  equal  and  whole; 
God  changes,  and  man,  and  the  form  of  them  bodily;  I  am  the 
soul. 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE     377 

"The  tree  many-rooted 

That  swells  to  the  sky 
With  frondage  red-fruited, 
The  life-tree  am  I; 
In  the  buds  of  your  lives  is  the  sap  of  my  leaves;  ye  shall  live 
and  not  die. 

"But  the  Gods  of  your  fashion 
That  take  and  that  give, 
In  their  pity  and  passion 
That  scourge  and  forgive. 
They  are  worms  that  are  bred  in  the  bark  that  falls  oflf;  they 
shall  die  and  not  live. 

"My  own  blood  is  what  stanches 
The  wounds  in  my  bark: 
Stars  caught  in  my  branches 
Make  day  of  the  dark. 
And  are  worshipped  as  suns  till  the  sunrise  shall  tread  out  their 
fires  as  a  spark." 

This  poem  may  be  particularly  commended  to  the 
attention  of  those  who  deny  its  author  the  possession 
of  keen  intellectual  powers  and  profound  philo- 
sophical thought. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  Swinburne,  besides  being  the 
most  musical  of  our  modern  poets,  is  at  least  equal 
to  any  of  the  others  both  in  point  of  scholarship  and 
of  intellectual  grasp.  In  his  treatment  of  the  his- 
torical problems  connected  with  the  life  of  Mary 
Stuart,  his  scholarship  elicits  a  degree  of  admiration 
less  only  than  that  which  we  accord  to  his  art.  This 
scholarship  is  particularly  attested  by  the  article 
on  Mary  Stuart  which  he  wrote  for  the  "Encyclo- 
paedia Britannica,"  by  his  exhaustive  study  of  Ben 


378  ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

Jonson,  and  by  many  of  his  essays  in  literary  criti- 
cism. Of  his  poetry  we  may  almost  say  that  it  has 
the  fault  of  being  too  intellectual,  of  standing  too 
far  aloof  from  the  emotional  life.  There  is  a  certain 
justice  in  the  complaint  which  Morris  made  to  the 
effect  that  Swinburne's  poetry  is  too  "literary,"  that 
it  gets  too  large  a  share  of  its  inspiration  from  books. 
His  subjects  are  nature  and  man,  in  common  with 
other  poets,  but  while  we  feel  him  to  be  in  direct 
contact  with  nature,  his  contact  with  man  seems  to 
be  made  indirectl}^,  through  the  medium  of  human 
records,  the  medium  of  philosophical  systems  and 
works  of  literary  art.  His  treatment  of  man  thus 
becomes  highly  abstract,  it  does  not  appeal  to  us 
upon  the  human  basis  of  our  common  experience.  It 
requires  only  a  cursory  examination  of  his  work  to 
realise  how  grotesquely  false  is  the  popular  idea 
which  makes  of  him  a  poet  of  passion  in  the  ordinary 
sense.  That  idea  is  based  upon  a  few  of  the  poems 
contained  in  a  single  early  volume,  of  which  he  him- 
self has  said  that 

"The  youngest  were  born  of  boy's  pastime. 
The  eldest  are  young," 

and  affords  a  striking  illustration  of  the  persistence 
of  an  irrational  prejudice.  Passion  he  has  in 
abundance,  but  it  is  the  passion  of  the  intellect  rather 
than  of  the  heart.  It  is  the  passion  of  Shelley's 
"Hymn  to  Intellectual  Beauty,"  or  of  Arnold's  "Em- 
pedocles  on  Etna."     In  his  verse, 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE  379 

"Thin,  thin  the  pleasant  human  noises  grow. 
And  faint  the  city  gleams;" 

we  seem  transported  into  a  purer  and  rarer  atmos- 
phere than  invests  our  daily  life,  and  brought  into 
communion  with  the  mountain-peaks  and  the  stars. 
Nowhere  else  in  our  poetry,  except  in  Wordsworth's 
loftiest  flights,  do  we  get  this  sense  of  spaciousness, 
of  the  free  emotion  of  the  spirit  in  some  supramun- 
dane  sphere. 

In  closing,  I  wish  to  say  a  few  words  about  Swin- 
burne's fundamental  attitude  toward  the  problem  of 
life  and  the  relation  between  man  and  the  universe. 
No  one  has  expressed  more  impressively  than  he  the 
contrast  between  the  vexed  insignificance  of  man  and 
the  calm  sublimity  of  nature. 

"O  strong  sun !  O  sea ! 
I  bid  not  you,  divine  things !  comfort  me, 
I  stand  not  up  to  match  you  in  your  sight; 
Who  hath  said  ye  have  mercy  toward  us,  ye  who  have  might?" 

But  no  poet  has  also  more  proudly  matched  the 
human  spirit  against  all  the  material  immensities 
which  it  contemplates,  and  has  so  asserted  its  in- 
herent dignity  and  indefectible  strength.  Most  of 
the  attributes  of  the  religious  temper  receive  his 
fullest  sympathy,  but  for  the  meek  and  lowly  attitude 
he  has  only  scorn.  Like  Kant,  he  is  filled  with  awe  in 
contemplation  of  the  boundless  universe  and  of  the 
soul  of  man  alike,  and  the  notion  of  humility  does 
not   comport   with  his  exalted   conception   of  man's 


380  ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

spiritual  possibilities.  His  attitude  is  that  of  Chap- 
man, holding  it  unlawful  that  man  "should  stoop  to 
any  other  law"  than  that  laid  down  by  his  own  higher 
nature,  of  the  Persian  Tent-maker,  offering  to  treat 
with  liis  Creator  upon  equal  terms,  and  abating  not 
one  jot  or  tittle  of  his  own  self-respect. 

"A  creed  is  a  rod. 

And  a  crown  is  of  night; 
But  this  thing  is  God, 

To  be  man  with  thy  might. 
To  grow  straight  in  the  strength  of  thy  spirit,  and  live  out  thy 
life  as  the  light." 

It  is  in  the  prelude  of  the  "Songs  before  Sunrise" 
that  we  find  the  most  magnificent  expression  of  the 
claims  of  the  indomitable  human  spirit,  of  the  soul 
that  stands  erect  in  the  presence  of  all  adverse  for- 
tmies,  and  bids  defiance  to  all  malign  fates. 

"His  soul  is  even  with  the  sun 
Whose  spirit  and  whose  eyes  are  one. 

Who  seeks  not  stars  by  day  nor  light 

And  hea\y  heat  of  day  by  night. 
Him  can  no  God  cast  down,  whom  none 

Can  lift  in  hope  beyond  the  height 
Of  fate  and  nature  and  things  done 

By  the  calm  rule  of  might  and  right 
That  bids  men  be  and  bear  and  do. 
And  die  beneath  blind  skies  or  blue. 

"But  weak  is  change,  but  strengthless  time. 
To  take  the  light  from  heaven  or  climb 
The  hills  of  heaven  with  wasting  feet. 
Songs  they  can  stop  that  earth  found  meet. 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE  381 

But  the  stars  keep  their  ageless  rhyme: 
Flowers  they  can  slay  that  spring  thought  sweet. 

But  the  stars  keep  their  spring  sublime; 
Passions  and  pleasures  can  defeat, 

Actions  and  agonies  control, 

And  life  and  death,  but  not  the  soul. 

"Because  man's  soul  is  man's  God  still. 
What  wind  soever  waft  his  will 

Across  the  waves  of  day  and  night 

To  port  or  shipwreck,  left  or  right. 
By  shores  and  shoals  of  good  and  ill; 

And  still  its  flame  at  mainmast  height 
Through  the  rent  air  that  foam-flakes  fill 

Sustains  the  indomitable  light 
Whence  only  man  hath  strength  to  steer 
Or  helm  to  handle  without  fear. 

"Save  his  own  soul's  light  overhead. 
None  leads  him,  and  none  ever  led. 

Across  birth's  hidden  harbour  bar, 

Past  youth  where  shoreward  shallows  are, 
Through  age  that  drives  on  toward  the  red 

Vast  void  of  sunset  hailed  from  far. 
To  the  equal  waters  of  the  dead; 

Save  his  own  soul  he  hath  no  star. 
And  sinks,  except  his  own  soul  guide, 
Helmless  in  middle  turn  of  tide. 

"No  blast  of  air  or  fire  of  sun 
Puts  out  the  light  whereby  we  run 

With  girdled  loins  our  lamp-lit  race. 

And  each  from  each  takes  heart  of  grace 
And  spirit  till  his  turn  be  done, 

And  light  of  face  from  each  man's  face 
In  whom  the  light  of  trust  is  one; 

Since  only  souls  that  keep  their  place 
By  their  own  light,  and  watch  things  roll, 
And  stand,  have  light  for  any  soul." 


382    ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 

Closely  associated  with  this  attitude  of  the  full- 
statured  soul,  proud  in  the  consciousness  of  its  own 
strength,  is  the  poet's  conception  of  duty,  and  his 
strenuous  demand  for  complete  sacrifice  of  self,  for 
utter  and  absolute  devotion  to  the  cause  of  man's 
freedom  in  both  body  and  spirit.  This  ideal  finds 
its  completest  expression  in  "The  Pilgrims,"  with  its 
alternation  of  sceptical  questioning  and  convincing 
response. 

— "Are  ye  not  weary  and  faint  not  by  the  way 
Seeing  night  by  night  devoured  of  day  by  day, 
Seeing  hour  by  hour  consumed  in  sleepless  fire? 
Sleepless;  and  ye  too,  when  shall  ye  too  sleep? 
— ^We  are  weary  in  heart  and  head,  in  hands  and  feet. 
And  surely  more  than  all  things  sleep  were  sweet. 
Than  all  things  save  the  inexorable  desire 

Which  whoso  knoweth  shall  neither  faint  nor  weep. 

— "Is  this  so  sweet  that  one  were  fain  to  follow? 
Is  this  so  sure  where  all  men's  hopes  are  hollow. 
Even  this  your  dream,  that  by  much  tribulation 

Ye  shall  make  whole  flawed  hearts,  and  bowed  necks 
straight  ? 
— Nay  though  our  life  were  blind,  our  death  were  fruitless. 
Not  therefore  were  the  whole  world's  high  hope  rootless; 
But  man  to  man,  nation  would  turn  to  nation. 
And  the  old  life  live,  and  the  old  great  word  be  great." 

There  is  no  finer  ethical  inspiration  in  all  English 
poetry  than  breathes  through  the  lines  of  these  noble 
stanzas.  No  other  poet  has  enforced  upon  us  with 
greater  impressiveness  what  Myers  calls  "the  resolve 
that  even  if  there  be  no  moral  purpose  already  in  the 


! 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE  383 

world,  man  shall  put  it  there;  that  even  if  all  evolu- 
tion be  necessarily  truncated,  yet  moral  evolution,  so 
long  as  our  race  lasts,  there  shall  be;  that  even  if 
man's  virtue  be  momentary,  he  shall  act  as  though  it 
were  an  eternal  gain."  It  was  an  inspiring  message 
that  the  finer  spirits  of  the  French  Revolution  be- 
queathed as  a  legacy  to  the  nineteenth  century;  is 
not  the  message  equally  inspiring  which  the  one  great 
poet  left  living  at  the  close  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury has  brought  to  the  twentieth  as  a  gift?  That 
message  is  again  illustrated,  and  if  possible  even 
more  impressively,  in  the  poem  entitled  "Super 
Flumina  Babylonis." 

"Unto  each  man  his  handiwork,  unto  each  his  crown, 
The  just  Fate  gives; 
Whoso  takes  the  world's  life  on  him  and  his  own  lays  down. 
He,  dying  so,  lives. 

"Whoso  bears  the  whole  heaviness  of  the  wronged  world's  weight 
And  puts  it  by. 
It  is  well  with  him  suffering,  though  he  face  man's  fate; 
How  should  he  die? 

"Seeing  death  has  no  part  in  him  any  more,  no  power 
Upon  his  head; 
He  has  bought  his  eternity  with  a  little  hour. 
And  is  not  dead. 

"For  an  hour,  if  ye  look  for  him,  he  is  no  more  found. 
For  one  hour's  space; 
Then  ye  lift  up  your  eyes  to  him  and  behold  him  crowned, 
A  deathless  face. 

"On  the  mountains  of  memory,  by  the  world's  well-springs, 
In  all  men's  eyes. 
Where  the  light  of  the  life  of  him  is  on  all  past  things, 
Death  only  dies." 


Unbex 


iEschylus,  10,  14,  60,  166. 

Alfieri,  V.,  180. 

America,  22-3. 

Anti-scrape  Society,  339. 

Aristotle,  119. 

Arnold,  M.,  6,  15,  24,  33,  72, 
79,  80,  88,  90,  120,  151,  155, 
157,  199,  225,  228,  251-283, 
292. 

Art  for  art's  sake,  7-11,  18. 

Arthurian  romance,  320. 

Bagehot,  W.,  155. 

Bax,  B.,  343. 

Beers,  H.  A.,  2. 

Beethoven,  L.  van,  50. 

Berkeley,  G.,  55. 

Biornson,  B.,  340. 

Blackwood's  Magazine,  24. 

Boehme,  J.,  113. 

Boerne,  L.,  70. 

Brandes,  G.,  81,  107-9,  207. 

British  Critic,  83. 

Brooke,  S.,  54,  57. 

Brown,  F.  M.,  290. 

Browning,  E.  B.,  4,  12,  147. 

Browning,  R.,  38,  54,  57,  58, 

140,  192-220,  247,  269,  292, 

349. 
Bruno,  G.,  112,  113. 
Buchanan,  R.,  297, 
Burke,  E.,  36,  57,  99. 
Burne- Jones,  E.,  287,  289,  290, 

292. 
Burns,  R.,  68. 
Byron,  G.  G.,  13,  25,  35,  59, 

64-95,  106,  107,  120, 141,  361. 


Caine,  H.,  84. 
Canning,  G.,  147, 


Campbell,  J.  D.,  126. 

Carducci,  G.,  348. 

Carlyle,  T.,  72,  73,  80,  93,  114, 
116,  125,  227,  273,  346,  358, 
361. 

Carman,  B.,  282. 

Castelar,  E.,  49. 

Chamisso,  A.  v.,  70. 

Chapman,  G.,  43,  380. 

Chartism,  193,  342. 

Chaucer,  322-4,  326-7. 

Classicism,  179.  (See  Ro- 
manticism.) 

Coleridge,  S.  T.,  35,  37,  55,  87, 
96-127,  131,  142,  176,  199. 

Colvin,  S.,  27,  179-80,  187. 

Condorcet,  J.  de,  38. 

Constant,  B.,  117. 

Convention  of  Cintra,  146, 
165. 

Corson,  H.,  11. 

Cowper,  W.,  59,  142. 

Crabbe,  G.,  142. 

Dante,  46,  49,  203,  301-6. 
Darwin,  C,  35,  212,  242. 
Delavigne,  C,  70. 
De  Quincey,  T.,  166. 
DeVere,  A.,  154. 
Dial,  288. 
Dickens,  C,  186. 
Didactic  literature,  8. 
Dowden,  E.,  34,  65,  70,  76,  94, 

103,  118,  147,  149,  163. 
Drachmann,  H.,  81. 

Eastern  Question  Association, 

339. 
Edinburgh  Review,  24. 
Education,  277-80. 


385 


386 


INDEX 


Emerson,  R.  W.,  210, 288,  376. 
English  society,  16,  66,  81-2. 
Ethics,  186,  382. 
Evolution,    2,    211-6,    239-43. 
(See  Darwin.) 

Fichte,  J.  G.,  111. 

Fitz  Gerald,  E.,  236. 

Flaubert,  G.,  70. 

Forman,  H.   B.,  31,  272,  299, 

335. 
Fox,  C.  J.,  36,  173. 
Freedom,  105-7,  144,  267. 
French  Revolution,  3,  15,  36, 

37,   39,   43-4,   64,   97-8,   100, 

135-9,    161,    163,    193,    268, 

284,  306,  383. 

Galton,  A.,  271. 

Gates,  L.  E.,  275,  281. 

Gentleman's  Magazine,  58. 

Germ,  286. 

German  literature,  114. 

Gifford,  W.,  173. 

Godwin,  W.,  41,  163. 

Goethe,  10,  29,  46,  69,  73,  74, 
83,  105,  115,  143,  117,  189, 
228,  229,  235,  257,  273,  376. 

Gosse,  E.,  286. 

Greek  Revolution,  51,  91,  92, 
168. 

Guiney,  L.  I.,  32. 

HaUam,  A.  H.,  221,  222-3. 
Hancock,  A.  E.,  76. 
Hardy,  T.,  84. 
Harrison,  F.,  35,  281. 
Hebraism,  275.  ' 

Heine,  H.,  75. 
Henley,  W.  T.,  88. 
Hellenism,  275-6,  327. 
Herder,  J.  G.,  165. 
Herford,  C.  H.,  195-6. 
Holmes,  E.,  152. 
Hood,  T.,  4. 

Houghton.  (See  Milnes,  R. 
M.) 


Hugo,  v.,  57,  70,  75,  373. 
Hunt,  H.,  292. 
Hunt,  L.,  24. 
Huxley,  T.  H.,  214. 

Ibsen,  H.,  80,  106,  335,  340. 
Iceland,  332,  334. 
Immerraann,  K.,  70. 
Italy,  161-2,  370-1. 

Jackson,  A.,  174. 
Johnson,  S.,  119. 
Jones,  H.,  201. 
Joubert,  J.,  33. 

Kant,  I.,  35,  55,  111,  112,  115, 

235   379. 
Keats',  J.,  1-32,  35,  55,  61,  87,^ 


Kingsley,  C,  342. 

Lamartine,  A.  de,  70. 

Lamb,  C,  120,  125. 

Landor,  W.  S.,  3,  13,  38,  91-2, 

100,  159-191,  195-6,  321,  371. 
Lang,  A.,  60. 
Leopardi,  G.,'  80. 
Lessing,  G.  E.,  115. 
Liberty.      (See  Freedom.) 
Life  and  poetry,  7,  12. 
LlandaflF,  Bishop  of,  137. 
LoweU,   J.    R.,   135,   155,    182, 

303. 

Mackail,    J.    W.,    324,    332-3, 

335,  341. 
Madison,  J.,  173. 
Magnusson,  E.,  332. 
Mallock,  W.  H.,  5. 
Martineau,  J.,  238. 
Masson,  D.,  17. 
Maurice,  F.  D.,  342. 
Mazzini,   G.,   69,   72,   93,    171, 

367-9,  371. 
Mickiewicz,  A.,  69. 
Mill,  J.  S.,  5,  112,  116,  124-5. 


INDEX 


387 


Milnes,  R. 
Milton,  J., 
Moore,  G., 
Moore,  T., 
Morley,    J, 

141,  150, 
Morris,  W 

290,  292, 
Miiller,  W. 
Musset,  A. 
Myers,   F. 

151,  227, 

354,  367, 
Mysticism, 


M.,  177,  187-8. 

46,  173,  371. 

84. 

4,  59. 
,,    38,    67,    89,    137, 

210,  252. 
.,  80,  195,  287,  289, 

316-347,  378. 
,  70. 

de,  70. 

W.    H.,    144,    150, 

233,  235,  298,  346, 

382. 

Ill,  113,  228,  234. 


Napoleon,    15,    100,    104,    145, 

164,  172. 
Napoleon,  Louis,  206,  366. 
Nature,  76-7. 
Nichol,  J.,  85. 

Omar  Khayyam,  380. 

Optimism,  209.  (See  Pessi- 
mism.) 

Oxford  and  Cambridge  Maga- 
zine, 288,  318. 

Paludan-Muller,  F.,  69. 
Pater,  W.,  7,  112,  154. 
Pessimism,  78-9,  80,  260,  329. 

(See  Optimism.) 
Phelps,  W.  L.,  2. 
Philistinism,  273-5. 
Pindar,  50. 
Pitt,  W.,  99,  163. 
Platen,  A.  70. 
Plato,  33,  55,  111. 
Plotinus,  110,  233. 
Poetry  and  Science,  132. 
Poetry,  Seriousness  of,  6. 
Poets,  Kinds  of,  17. 
Pollok,  R.,  8. 
Pre-Raphaelite     Brotherhood, 

287. 
Proclus,  110. 
Puritanism,  275. 
Pushkin,  A.  S.,  69. 


Quarterly  Review,  24. 

Republicanism,  173-5,  371-3. 
Religion,   55-8,    149-51,    176-7, 

200,   222,   224,  232-3,   238-9, 

252-4,    264-6,    270-2,    310-2, 

373. 
Renan,  E.,  346. 
Romanticism,  1,  178. 
Rossetti,  C,  4,  286,  301. 
Rossetti,  D.  G.,  197,  284-315, 

317. 
Rossetti,  G.,  301. 
Rossetti,  M.  F.,  301. 
Rossetti,  W.  M.,  48. 
Rousseau,  J.  J.,  37,  75,  76,  77, 

252. 
Royce,  J.,  200. 
Ruskin,  J.,  253,  287,  339-40. 

Sagas,  332. 

Sainte-Beuve,  C.  A.,  76. 
Saintsbury,  G.,  357. 
Santayana,  G.,  218-9. 
Saturday  Review,  19,  365. 
Schelling,  F.  W.  J.,  111-2. 
Schopenhauer,  A.,  78-80,  214. 
Scott,  W.,  4,  114,  154. 
Shakespeare,  W.,  18,  119,  123, 

207,  359. 
Sharp,  W.,  317,  335. 
Shelley,  P.  B.,  6,  13,  28,  33-63, 

64-6,  68,  78,  87,  89,  106,  107, 

110,    138,    150,    197-9,    280, 

361,  373. 
Shorey,  P.,  239,  247. 
Sidney,  P.,  5. 
Singleton,  A.,  29. 
Smith,  G.,  207. 
Socialism,  342-3. 
Southey,  R.,  4,  37,  98, 104,  142, 

167. 
Spain,  145,  165. 
Spencer,  H.,  212. 
Spinoza,  B.,  235,  259,  376. 
Stael,  Mme.  de,  117. 
Stedman,  E.  C,  160,  178,  189, 

291,  328,  352. 


388 


INDEX 


SteflFens,  H.,  117. 

Stephen,  L.,  273. 

StiUman,  W.  J.,  7. 

Stowe,  H.  B.,  86. 

Swinburne,  1,  3,  10,  56,  62,  69, 
88,  90,  93,  126,  133,  154,  162, 
166,  168,  183,  205-6,  232,  258, 
263-4,  280,  287,  289,  291-2, 
294-5,  298,  300,  307,  319, 
321-47,  348,  383. 

Switzerland,   101-2. 

Symonds,  J.  A.,  62. 

Taine,  H.  A.,  64,  69. 

Tennyson,  A.,  35,  87,  88,  192, 
199,  214,  221-50,  259,  269, 
292,  320-1,  342,  349,  365, 
376. 

"Theologia  Germanica,"  113. 

Tolstoy,  L.,  339-40. 

TourgueniefF,  I.  S.,  80. 

TraiU,  H.  D.,  121. 

Transcendentalism,  111. 


Trelawny,  E.  J.,  61. 
Trent,  W.  P.,  84. 

Venice,  175. 

Voltaire,  F.  M.  A.  de,  37,  40, 

77. 

Washington,  G.,  162. 

Watson,  W.,  158-9,  250. 

Watts-Dunton,  T.,  248,  314, 
337-8 

Wertherism,  73-5. 

White,  R.  G.,  352. 

Winckelmann,  J.  J.,  29,  115. 

Wolf,  F.  A.,  115. 

Woodberry,  G.  E.,  33,  39,  54, 
55. 

Wordsworth,  W.,  1,  5,  13,  28, 
37,  39,  59,  68,  75,  77,  87,  97, 
104,  107,  119-20,  128-158, 
176-7,  199,  214,  261,  379. 

Young,  E.,  8,  59. 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 

Los  Angeles 
This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


ftct/wa^Ofgg'^ 


s^  mW^ 


U«l^J\V 


FEB  18 1969 


IIj 


f    t! 


3  1158  00392  3215 


t 


S5 

O  3 

s 


J 


PLEA«E  DO  NOT   REMOVE 
THIS  BOOK  CARD=i 


University  Research  Library 


